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This is the 87th edition of The Web3 + AI Daily - your definitive guide to the intersection of blockchain and AI. Crypto creating new financial vehicles for the physical infrastructure powering AI is emerging as an important new intersection of Web3 and AI. Today, I’m sharing two recent examples: Bullish financing GPU-backed loans via USD.AI, and Falcon Finance turning GPU financing itself into a tradable onchain security.
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Bullish Extends $100M to USD.AI to Boost GPU-Backed Loans
Crypto platform and CoinDesk parent company, Bullish, is providing USD.AI with a $100M credit facility to expand its GPU-backed lending capacity.
USD.AI is a stablelcoin protocol created to finance AI infrastructure with onchain capital. It will use the liquidity offered by Bullish to make loans to AI-infrastructure operators, with GPUs and other high-performance computing equipment serving as collateral.
“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.
The fact that Bullish is deploying capital into GPU financing is a strong signal that crypto-native financial institutions are beginning to treat AI compute as an investable/financeable real-world asset class. In fact, the deal illustrates a growing trend within the Crypto-AI intersection: Migrating onchain capital to real-world assets and businesses through tokenization and stablecoins.
With the competition for computation resources dramatically intensifying, compute is becoming a credit market in its own right and such agreements are becoming more significant.
Falcon Finance and NEAR AI Launch Tokenized GPU Forward
Falcon Finance has announced the opening of a regulated tokenization pipeline in El Salvador, with its first issuance currently being structured as a tokenized GPU forward: an investment vehicle designed to finance the purchase and delivery of AI compute infrastructure. NEAR AI joins to guarantee the demand for the compute the hardware will produce.
Let’s break all this down. The problems Falcon is trying to solve are:
AI GPUs are funded through private, illiquid credit investments, and a “lender who wants out before maturity has very few options“
Investors face a four-to-eight-month wait between the moment they pay for the GPUs and the moment the chips are delivered and start generating revenue.
So, Falcon wants to turn the financing of AI GPUs into a regulated tokenized security that can trade onchain. Moreover, if it becomes sufficiently liquid, it may be pledged as collateral to borrow/mint Falcon’s USDf stablecoin.
The structure brings together several pieces of the emerging AI–crypto financial stack. The GPU equipment is contracted at a fixed price through October, while NEAR AI AI provides anchor demand for the compute capacity and is also acting as a technology partner. Investors would finance the equipment before delivery, with the resulting compute infrastructure generating revenue once operational.
The financing will be issued through NOTA S.A.S. de C.V., a digital-asset service provider registered under El Salvador’s Digital Assets Issuance Law. Unlike conventional private credit, the resulting asset is designed to trade on permissionless markets such as Uniswap, potentially giving investors a secondary market for an otherwise illiquid investment.
Falcon’s announcement therefore points to a potentially important new intersection between AI infrastructure, private credit, tokenization and decentralized finance.
Instead of AI compute being financed exclusively by hyperscalers, banks and private-credit funds, tokenization could allow capital from onchain markets to finance GPUs, while stablecoins and DeFi provide additional liquidity once the underlying assets become sufficiently mature.
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