K Wave Media Leads Crypto Firms' Faltering Pivot to AI

A wave of crypto treasury companies is rebranding as AI and data-center plays after their digital-asset playbook stopped working, and the market so far is not buying the story. Bloomberg reports that at least a dozen digital-asset treasury firms, or DATs, have turned to AI-related businesses in recent months amid a slump in crypto prices.

The tape is unflattering. K Wave Media, a former Bitcoin accumulator that shifted to data-center development, is down 71% since rebooting in May. AlphaTON Capital, which rebranded as Alpha Compute Corp. in April, has dropped 33%. Lixte Biotechnology Holdings has fallen 33% since agreeing to merge with a battery firm in June. Bloomberg puts the median decline for the US and Canadian DAT stocks it tracks at 43% since the start of the year.

Two law-firm partners quoted in the piece capture the mood. Gregory Sichenzia, founding partner at Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel, said "last year DATs could do no wrong, and this year they're dirty words," and his firm has not received a DAT private-placement request since October. Daniel Forman of Lowenstein Sandler was blunter: "I think DATs, as we've seen them, are probably done." The new inbound, per Sichenzia, is for AI-adjacent shells, including data centers, space exploration and small nuclear reactors.

The honest caveat is that these are short-window share-price moves in a beaten-down risk-on cohort, not verdicts on the operating merits of any specific pivot. What the reporting doesn't give you is how much real AI capex any of these companies are actually deploying versus recycling the ticker to ride a narrative, and that distinction is likely what investors are now pricing. The read for anyone building or backing serious AI infrastructure is that the rebrand tax is already visible: capital is going to be harder to raise on story alone, and operators who can point at signed GPU orders, power contracts, or tenants widen their advantage over the shells hunting the same pitch deck.