The AI industry welcomes Tether, a company with deep pockets.
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The AI industry welcomes Tether, a company with deep pockets.
The best AI business model might be not doing AI.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Kuli, TechFlow
Tether earned $13 billion in 2024.
You might not grasp this number. Let's put it another way: OpenAI had revenue of $3.7 billion in 2024 but lost $5 billion. Anthropic had revenue of $1 billion and also lost $5 billion.
The combined losses of these two legitimate AI companies still don't exceed what Tether earned in a single year.
Tether has 150 employees, while OpenAI has over 3,000. The per capita output difference is roughly:
60 times.
How does Tether make money? When you buy 1 USDT, they receive $1 and use it to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. The interest from those bonds goes to them, not you.
The essence of this is that Tether doesn't pay interest. Banks pay interest on deposits; Tether doesn't. You hold your money as USDT and get zero interest. They use your money to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, earning $7 billion in interest alone in 2024.
150 people managing over $130 billion in Treasury bonds, doing nothing, and the interest just rolls in.
Who wouldn't want to lie back with a business like that?
But with so much money, it has to be spent somewhere. Tether chose a direction:
AI.
And they're not just casually investing in a couple of projects to check a box.
First, computing power.
Running AI requires GPUs, the more the better, and the more expensive the better. Tether provided over $600 million in loans to a German company called Northern Data.
What does this company do?
It's Europe's largest GPU cloud service provider. Over ten thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs—the kind OpenAI used to train GPT, costing $20,000 to $30,000 each.
The cluster formed by these GPUs ranks 26th in the global TOP500 supercomputer list. With this $600 million investment, Tether essentially bought an AI training base in Europe.
Next, data.
Training AI requires feeding it data. Last week, Tether released a dataset called QVAC Genesis, covering 19 subjects including mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science. They claim it's the world's largest open-source AI training dataset.
Consider that OpenAI's and Anthropic's training data are not public. Tether just released theirs for free, available for anyone to use.
Then comes the more sci-fi part.
In April 2024, Tether spent $200 million to acquire a company called Blackrock Neurotech. Despite the "Blackrock" in the name, it has no relation to BlackRock.
This company works on brain-computer interfaces. They implant chips in people's brains, allowing paralyzed individuals to type with their thoughts, control wheelchairs, and operate robotic arms. It sounds like science fiction, but they started in 2008, eight years before Musk's Neuralink.
How impressive is this company?
Globally, only 35 people have brain-computer interface chips implanted. Of those, 31 use Blackrock's technology. In 2016, a completely paralyzed patient used their device to control a robotic arm and fist-bump Obama. The chip implanted in the sensory cortex allowed him to "feel" the president's hand.
Last year, this brain-computer interface company enabled an ALS patient to "speak" again. The chip in his brain translated his thoughts into speech at 62 words per minute.
Tether spent $200 million to become the major shareholder of this company.
And it doesn't stop there. This year, Tether invested €70 million in an Italian robotics company. Reportedly, they are negotiating with another German robotics company, offering:
$1.2 billion.
In total, Tether has poured nearly $3 billion into AI-related fields.
What does this mean?
Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in total funding for 2024. The investment from Tether alone is almost equivalent to the fundraising of a legitimate, leading AI company.
OpenAI spent $6.7 billion on R&D in the first half of 2025. Tether, using just a fraction of its profits, can be a major financier in the AI world.
Why is a stablecoin company getting into AI?
We think there are two possibilities.
The first is anxiety. The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates, and Treasury yields are falling. Lying back and earning $7 billion in interest in 2024 might not be so easy from 2025 onward. Even a money-printing machine needs a new narrative.
The second is ambition. The whole world is talking about AI—investors, media, politicians. If you say you're a stablecoin company, no one pays much attention. But if you say you're working on AI, brain-computer interfaces, and humanoid robots, then you're:
A tech leader.
What's most interesting is this.
Tether's AI efforts come with slogans like "decentralization," "local operation," and "returning intelligence to the individual."
But Tether itself is the most centralized company in the crypto space.
They decide token issuance, they decide reserve amounts. In ten years of operation, they've never been audited. Only they know where users' money is.
Now, this company wants to teach the world about "decentralized AI."
It's a bit like a casino owner offering classes on how to quit gambling.
Not that it can't be done.
After all, OpenAI is still losing money, not expected to stop burning cash until 2029. Anthropic is similar, aiming for 2028. Sam Altman is fundraising everywhere, Dario Amodei is fundraising everywhere. The two companies have combined losses of $10 billion and are still pitching stories to investors.
Tether doesn't need to pitch. The money is already in their pocket.
What's the biggest challenge facing the entire AI industry? The business model.
How to make money? Don't know. When will it make money? Don't know. Can it make money? Don't know.
Tether doesn't have this worry. Their business model is:
Not doing AI.
Use the money earned from stablecoins to invest in AI. If the investments succeed, it's foresight; if they fail, it's tuition. It doesn't affect the core business anyway.
Those doing AI are losing money; those not doing AI are making money. Those doing AI are fundraising; those not doing AI are investing.
The best AI business model in 2026 might just be not doing AI.
Get the money-printing machine sorted first.
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