USD.AI secures $100M in debt financing

Bullish, the crypto exchange operator, supplied the facility in stablecoins. USD.AI will use the money to lend against GPUs and other high-performance computing hardware. The loans are non-recourse, so the hardware is the collateral and borrowers do not pledge their wider businesses. USD.AI is built by Permian Labs, led by CEO David Choi. Bullish will list sUSDai, the protocol's yield-bearing staked dollar token, on several trading pairs backed by a market-making program. The aim is a secondary market for GPU-backed debt. The two companies are also expanding a joint research effort on capital formation models for AI capex. Bullish had already put $4 million into USD.AI. That was its first venture investment after its IPO. At announcement, the protocol held more than $225 million in locked crypto assets, so the new line is large relative to its existing base. The deal sits where private credit for AI infrastructure meets tokenized real-world assets. For AI founders, especially compute-heavy ones, the deal shows another source of hardware-secured financing that does not rely on equity or on pledging the whole company. Terms such as pricing and loan tenor were not in the coverage found. The test will be whether a liquid sUSDai market produces a usable benchmark for the cost of compute.