Overview
- BlackRock’s Digital Assets Research team released a white paper that maps AI’s evolution in three phases—buildout, adoption, transformation—and links that path to rising demand for programmable settlement and compute markets.
- The paper proposes that AI compute could be priced, financed, and traded as tokenized assets, creating markets where claims on GPU and data-center capacity are standardized contracts.
- BlackRock projects large scale economics for the idea, citing potential annual AI infrastructure investment north of $700 billion and roughly $1.1 trillion in hyperscaler cloud revenue by 2030 as the addressable market.
- Stablecoins are singled out as the most likely settlement rail for machine-initiated payments because they combine fiat stability with blockchain programmability and near-instant settlement.
- The research is expressly exploratory rather than a product launch and warns the concept is largely speculative until robust permissions, identity, and compliance infrastructure are built.