While everyone was busy chasing the next Nvidia, Ethereum quietly ate AI hardware’s lunch. Over the past month, ETH outperformed the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM), a basket of global memory chip companies tied to the AI boom, by 55 percentage points, according to Fundstrat’s Tom Lee.
The case for ETH as AI infrastructure
Tom Lee laid out his thesis around July 17, framing Ethereum not as a speculative crypto bet but as critical infrastructure for the AI economy. His argument hinges on a simple idea: as autonomous AI agents proliferate, they need a neutral, programmable system to move money around. Lee says Ethereum provides exactly that, acting as the “guardrails” of consumer trust in a world where machines increasingly transact with other machines.
The Roundhill Memory ETF launched on April 2 and focuses on global memory chip companies, the kind of firms that supply the physical hardware powering AI workloads.
Institutional money is noticing
