Digital asset platform Bullish announced on August 28, 2026, a $100 million stablecoin-based debt facility to USD.AI, an onchain protocol that originates non-recourse loans secured by GPU hardware, marking Bullish’s entry into middle-market AI infrastructure financing.
The facility will fund USD.AI’s GPU financing operations, which lend capital directly against high-performance computing assets. In the announcement, Bullish described AI infrastructure financing as a capital-intensive sector that has rapidly become one of the largest in private credit, with a scale it said eclipses legacy debt markets such as auto loans and home equity lines of credit.
David Choi, CEO of Permian Labs, the developer of USD.AI, said the facility and Bullish’s institutional market infrastructure will help the protocol finance more of the AI buildout while creating deeper markets for compute-backed credit. “Bullish recognizes that compute is becoming a credit market in its own right,” Choi said.
sUSDai Trading Pairs and Market Making
The facility is powered by liquidity from Bullish Exchange, the company’s institutional spot and derivatives marketplace. As part of the arrangement, Bullish will onboard sUSDai, USD.AI’s yield-bearing staked dollar token, across multiple trading pairs supported by a dedicated market-making program. Once those markets are live, the companies said they expect deeper secondary liquidity and price discovery for GPU-based debt, along with a more transparent market for the cost of compute.
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. He described backing the facility as a step toward bringing tokenized assets to institutional scale.
USD.AI’s GPU-Collateralized Loan Structure
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. Under the protocol’s published terms, 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.
Facilities generally finance 70 to 80 percent of hardware cost against a borrower down payment of 20 to 30 percent paid to the equipment manufacturer, with the senior financing held in escrow and released once servers are installed and verified at the data center. Loans run 36 months with straight-line amortization and no prepayment penalties, include a working capital reserve covering three months of peak debt service funded at closing, and carry a 3 percent origination fee. Interest rates range from 7 percent for investment-grade offtake contracts to as high as 15 percent for deployments without an offtake agreement, and an on-premises monitoring node tracks GPU utilization, uptime, and asset health through the life of each loan.
On the capital side, 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, with both streams accruing into the exchange ratio between the two tokens. The protocol is governed by holders of its CHIP token, who vote on which hardware qualifies as collateral, how interest rate tiers are structured, and how fees are set.
Prior Bullish Investment in USD.AI
The facility extends an existing relationship between the two companies. 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. Bullish, which operates a regulated spot and derivatives exchange and is the parent company of digital asset media provider CoinDesk, said then that the investment reflected its belief in the utility of stablecoins and tokenization.
USD.AI’s protocol was developed by Permian Labs, a Delaware corporation. The protocol’s website currently lists $491 million in total deposits, a $236 million active loan pipeline, and more than 76,000 users.
Alongside the debt facility, Bullish and USD.AI said they are expanding their 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 in an effort to connect onchain liquidity with demand for AI compute.
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