September CPI, AI Chip Selloff, & Anthropic Public Benefit Fund

View from the Arch #154

October 20, 2026

This Week at Arch: Turn your 2026 tax bill into Bitcoin mining

Hosted mining is one of the most powerful ways to reduce your taxes and accumulate Bitcoin at the same time. TaxShield makes it turnkey.

You borrow against your BTC with Arch and use the loan to buy Bitcoin miners that Blockware hosts and operates in U.S. data centers. If you qualify, you may deduct the full cost of the equipment in year one under 100% bonus depreciation (IRC §168(k)). The miners are titled in your name, Blockware handles power, uptime, and maintenance, and mined BTC is paid to your wallet every month, which you can use to help cover loan interest. And most importantly: you never sell your Bitcoin.

Three reasons to look at it now:

  • Year-end is close. To claim bonus depreciation on your 2026 taxes, the equipment generally has to be bought and placed in service by December 31. Sourcing and energizing machines takes time, so starting early matters.

  • Fewer miners are competing for rewards. Large miners keep moving capacity to AI and high-performance computing. As a result, Bitcoin's total network hashrate fell for 11 straight months. Less competition is good news for those who stay and mine.

  • Many long-term miners add capacity in quieter markets. Hardware costs tend to move with Bitcoin, and some miners prefer to buy when the market is calm rather than near the top of a cycle. Arch doesn't forecast prices, but current equipment costs belong in your planning.

Tax treatment and eligibility depend on your situation. Review the structure with your tax professional.

This Week in Crypto

Nothing too crazy in terms of price movement this week:

  • Bitcoin spent the week bouncing between roughly $80,100 and $83,000.

    • The low came Thursday at just over $80K, after September CPI came in at 3.7% against a forecast of about 3.6%, and producer prices rose 1.3% against a forecast of 0.6% (more on that later!).

    • An AI and chip stock selloff piled on, with the 10-year Treasury yield above 5% and Brent crude near $110.

    • That’s a lot of macro to ask a non-sovereign digital asset to shrug off, but honestly it mostly did!

ETF flows were more of a mood swing:

  • Bitcoin funds bled $228M for the week and digital asset products overall lost $593M.

  • But on Monday, spot Bitcoin ETFs took in about $526.7M, their biggest day in about a month.

  • Ether ETFs, meanwhile, logged a fourth straight day of outflows.

This Week in TradFi

Some September numbers for you:

  • September CPI rose 0.6% MoM and 3.7% YoY, against a 3.6% consensus, with core at 2.6% vs. 2.5% expected.

    • The S&P 500 fell 1.11%, its worst day since July 29, and the 10-year touched 5.329% intraday before closing at 5.190%.

  • And PPI rose 1.3% on the month against a 0.6% forecast, working out to 6.3% YoY.

  • September retail sales rose 0.8% against a 0.3% forecast, and initial jobless claims came in at 199,000.

  • The Fed is in its blackout period ahead of its October 27–28 meeting, and futures priced roughly a 17% chance of a hike there on Friday, and 89% for December.

This week’s big damage was in tech:

  • On Wednesday, Gartner said more than $3.5T of AI infrastructure spending could be exposed to impairment by 2030, and that over 80% of “neocloud” providers (the companies that rent out Nvidia chips) would stop operating independently by then.

  • That day CoreWeave fell 15.46%, and Oracle fell 8.83%.

  • On Friday, the S&P 500 lost 1.1% and the Nasdaq sank 2.1% as Micron fell 5.6% and Intel fell 5.8%.

And oil is back above $100:

  • November WTI rose 10.41% on the week to $101.41, its best week since mid-July, and Brent closed at $109.86.

This Week in Tech

TSMC posted another record quarter:

  • While AI stocks sold off all week, the company that actually makes the chips reported its numbers on Thursday.

  • Q3 net income hit NT$763.06B and revenue NT$1.494T, up 68.7% and 50.9% from a year earlier, beating consensus and marking its sixth consecutive record quarter.

  • There was one wrinkle for the margin watchers: gross margin slipped to 66.4% from 67.7%, which the company blamed on ramp-up costs for its 2-nanometer node (whatever that means…).

On Sunday, Anthropic announced that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, subject to stockholder approval, with an additional 2% added at the board’s discretion for every 50% increase in the company’s value above a set baseline.

  • Companies often give executives stock grants that grow as the company’s value rises, and Anthropic says it is aiming that kind of escalator at the public instead.

  • Counting the co-founders’ pledge to donate 80% of their equity and an employee matching program (about half of staff participate), roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares would be dedicated to the public good.

  • Anthropic said it could be used for large donations to nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations, citing AI’s labor-market effects as one focus.

And some quick headlines for you:

  • OpenCode got hacked, and its AI assistants refused to help. Hackers got into part of the open-source coding agent’s online platform and stole some users’ API keys, and the AI tools it turned to for help kept refusing to look at the malicious code. The robots were, at least, consistent about their safety training. Silver linings, right?

  • Amazon wants to loosen CUDA’s grip. Its new Torch Neuron developer tool aims to break Nvidia’s hold on PyTorch so more developers can run on alternative chips like its own.

  • DeepSeek gets banned and releases weights in the same week. The U.S. banned DeepSeek from government agency systems, while DeepSeek opened the weights for V4.1-Flash and launched a $0.75 search API.

  • Looking ahead: Meta leads a heavy week of tech earnings, and Apple’s event lands October 28, the same day as the Fed decision.

Arch is building a next-gen wealth management platform for individuals holding Alternative Assets. Our flagship product is the crypto-backed loan, which allows you to securely and affordably borrow against your crypto.

Disclaimer: None of the above is financial advice, seriously.