Bullish extends $100M debt facility to USD.AI for GPU-backed loans

Bullish, the digital asset platform and parent of CoinDesk, extended a $100 million debt facility to USD.AI, a stablecoin protocol that originates non-recourse loans secured by graphics processing units, according to an announcement Friday. The financing is powered by liquidity from Bullish Exchange and will fund loans covering 70 to 80 percent of hardware cost against borrower down payments of 20 to 30 percent.

"Compute is becoming a credit market in its own right," David Choi, CEO of USD.AI developer Permian Labs, said in the announcement. The facility will allow USD.AI to "finance more of the AI buildout while creating deeper, more transparent markets for compute-backed credit," he added.

Loans run 36 months with straight-line amortization, no prepayment penalties, and interest rates ranging from 7 percent for investment-grade offtake contracts to 15 percent for deployments without offtake agreements. USD.AI currently holds more than $225 million in crypto assets locked in the protocol, with $491 million in total deposits and a $236 million active loan pipeline as of this writing.

The arrangement sits at the intersection of two fast-growing markets: private credit for AI infrastructure, which Bullish said now eclipses legacy debt markets such as auto loans and home equity lines of credit, and tokenized real-world assets seeking crypto liquidity. Bullish will list USD.AI's sUSDai token across multiple trading pairs with a dedicated market-making program, creating a secondary market for GPU-backed debt exposure.

How USD.AI Structures GPU-Backed Loans

USD.AI originates non-recourse loans secured by GPU infrastructure and the cashflows those assets generate, according to the protocol's documentation. Recourse is limited to the collateral itself, with springing recourse to the borrower's corporate entity only in the event of fraud or other malicious behavior. A bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle holds the financed servers, and USD.AI takes a first-priority security interest in the GPU servers and all vehicle assets.

Each loan includes a working capital reserve covering three months of peak debt service funded at closing and carries a 3 percent origination fee. An on-premises monitoring node tracks GPU utilization, uptime, and asset health through the life of each loan.

Depositors contribute stablecoins to mint USDai, a fully backed synthetic dollar collateralized by the PYUSD stablecoin, which is in turn backed by US Treasuries and cash equivalents. USDai is redeemable at any time and does not accrue yield. Depositors seeking yield stake USDai to mint sUSDai, which captures interest paid by GPU borrowers together with Treasury bill yield earned on idle reserves. The protocol is governed by holders of its CHIP token, who vote on which hardware qualifies as collateral and how interest rate tiers are structured.

Prior Bullish Investment

The facility extends an existing relationship. On September 22, 2025, Bullish Capital, the firm's venture investment arm, announced a $4 million investment in USD.AI — Bullish's first since completing its initial public offering in August 2025, a listing in which it received $1.15 billion of its IPO proceeds in stablecoins. At the time, USD.AI said it had secured $250 million in private beta deposits.

Thomas Cowan, Bullish's head of tokenization, said USD.AI's onchain transparency gave the firm the visibility to underwrite the facility with the same institutional diligence it applies across its platform. "Our commitment to USD.AI reflects a conviction we've believed since our first investment in the protocol: that credible, well-structured real-world assets belong onchain," Cowan said.

Alongside the debt facility, Bullish and USD.AI said they are expanding a joint research initiative to optimize capital formation models for the AI capital expenditure sector, pairing Bullish's market structure expertise with USD.AI's GPU financing architecture.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.