(Updated with comments from Solstice CEO)
Onchain lending platform Solstice has expanded its AI infrastructure financing programme, announcing a facility of up to $1bn with TensorX, a Dublin-based sovereign AI infrastructure company, to fund GPU hardware and data centre buildout across Europe.
The facility represents a significant scaling of an existing partnership, in which Solstice teamed up with ApexE3 and the then-named Tensorix to develop aiUSX, a yield-bearing token giving holders exposure to returns from AI infrastructure lending. TensorX rebranded from Tensorix on 19 Jun.
Both Solstice and TensorX operate within the Deus X Capital investment ecosystem.
TensorX owns and operates a fleet of Nvidia GPUs and delivers AI models from data centres in Dublin and Helsinki. It runs private AI inference, the process by which a trained model uses new data to generate a prediction or answer, on dedicated Nvidia infrastructure. This allows customers to deploy open-weight models under sovereign AI conditions, meaning the infrastructure is hosted and controlled within a specific jurisdiction rather than on third-party cloud infrastructure, keeping data within the continent. Earlier this week, TensorX said it had raised €8mn to purchase Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, including the latest B300 chips.
"Europe wants AI that can run on its own terms, on its own soil, without handing its data to someone else's cloud on the world stage," said Tim Grant, executive chair of TensorX. "The billion dollars going into GPUs and data-centre capacity is the first step, and we expect to keep buying as demand grows. Solstice gives us a financing partner that can keep pace with this incredibly fast-moving market."
Ben Nadareski, CEO and cofounder of Solstice, told Sandmark that the company believes this is the first partnership of its kind in DeFi. "Sovereign AI is emerging as the industry's next major theme, and Solstice is building a way for our ecosystem partners to participate early through the same high-quality yield infrastructure we have spent the past three years building."
Solstice will provide onchain financing for the buildout using aiUSX, through which companies can put capital set aside for AI spend to work in infrastructure lending while keeping it liquid and redeemable, with returns applicable toward future inference costs.
"Every company is turning into an AI company, and every one of them watches its inference bill climb," said Nadareski. "aiUSX puts the money they set aside for AI to work in the meantime. They get access to the kind of AI-infrastructure lending that used to sit with large institutions, the capital stays liquid, and what it earns goes toward inference later. It is treasury management for the AI era."
Both TensorX and Solstice sit within the Deus X Capital ecosystem, a relationship their common backer acknowledged in the announcement. "Sovereign AI is one of the biggest infrastructure buildouts of this decade, and it runs on capital as much as it runs on chips," said Stuart Connolly, chief investment officer of Deus X Capital. "TensorX builds the compute, Solstice brings the financing, and aiUSX lets more companies take part in funding it."
Asked about potential customer demand, Nadareski said that a network of Liquidity Providers "has already expressed interest," and that Solstice currently holds around "half a billion dollars" in its eUSX yield-bearing token. "Those partners, both existing and new, are looking for fresh sources of yield to diversify into, from a name they already know and trust."
Solstice Finance's three core assets comprise USX, an overcollateralized, US dollar-pegged stablecoin, eUSX, a yield-bearing token for risk-managed strategies, and SLX, a governance token with protocol-based utility.
Solstice says it has a three-year audited track record and more than $500mn in total value locked (TVL), the total amount of assets deposited in a protocol used as a measure of its scale.
