Two fresh developments on Aug. 28, 2026 highlighted the deepening convergence between cryptocurrency liquidity and artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Crypto trading platform Bullish said it would commit $100 million to USD.AI, an AI infrastructure finance protocol, while digital asset manager CoinShares published research projecting that AI and high-performance computing revenue could account for roughly 70% of listed Bitcoin miners' income by year-end.
Bullish's investment is intended to support loans for AI infrastructure companies that use high-performance computing hardware such as GPUs as collateral. USD.AI already holds more than $225 million in deposited cryptocurrencies and plans to use that liquidity to offer GPU-backed credit. Bullish also intends to list sUSDai, a token tied to the GPU-backed lending pool, on its exchange, potentially giving traders exposure to AI infrastructure finance. The move links stablecoin liquidity from crypto markets with physical AI compute demand, but the model carries risks including hardware depreciation, fluctuating GPU valuations, and evolving regulatory scrutiny of crypto-backed lending.
Separately, CoinShares said Bitcoin mining companies listed in the United States are rapidly shifting away from pure-play mining. The report noted AI-related revenue's share could climb from about 30% at the start of 2025 to approximately 70% by December, as miners repurpose power capacity, cooling systems and data-center shells for AI and HPC workloads. The pivot follows the April 2024 Bitcoin halving, which cut block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC and squeezed mining margins. CoinShares also said the total value of AI-related contracts signed by listed miners has at times exceeded $70 billion.
As AI revenue grows, investors are increasingly valuing miners on data-center capacity, power availability and contracted revenue rather than hash rate alone. That could reduce correlation between mining stocks and Bitcoin's price, but it may also affect the hash rate available to secure the Bitcoin network if miners shift capacity to AI clients.
