Bullish BLSH$32.71·At close, the cryptocurrency platform and CoinDesk’s parent company, is extending a $100 million debt facility to USD.AI to bring onchain capital into the capital-intensive business of building the infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence (AI), according to an emailed announcement on Friday.
The financing will provide USD.AI with liquidity to make loans secured by graphics processing units (GPUs). These specialized electronic chips underpin the AI industry by processing vast amounts of data in parallel.
The arrangement represents an intersection between two investment themes: the increasing demand for private credit to finance AI infrastructure and efforts to tokenize real-world assets to access crypto’s pools of liquidity.
USD.AI is a stablecoin protocol designed to connect AI infrastructure financing with onchain capital. As of this writing, crypto assets worth over $225 million were locked in the protocol.
“Compute is becoming a credit market in its own right,” David Choi, CEO of USD.AI developer Permian Labs, said in Friday’s announcement. Bullish’s facility will allow USD.AI to “finance more of the AI buildout while creating deeper, more transparent markets for compute-backed credit,” he added.
Bullish also plans to list USD.AI’s sUSDai across multiple trading pairs, creating a secondary market for exposure to GPU-backed debt.
