BlackRock says AI compute could be tokenized in the future

BlackRock’s Digital Assets Research team just published a white paper that reads like a roadmap for a world where GPUs are the new gold bars. The paper, titled “The Machine-Native Economy: How digital assets connect intelligence, commerce, and compute,” lays out a vision in which AI compute power gets priced, financed, and traded as tokenized digital assets. What BlackRock is actually proposing The paper identifies three areas where AI and programmable finance are starting to converge: automated machine-to-machine payments, tokenized financial assets, and emerging markets for computing capacity. That last one is the headline grabber. BlackRock’s researchers argue that standardized digital contracts, essentially claims on compute resources, could become tools for financing and programmable settlement. AI agents would transact based on factors like price, performance, and latency, choosing compute providers the way an algorithm picks the cheapest flight. The scale of the opportunity isn’t trivial. The paper estimates that revenue from hyperscaler cloud services will hit roughly $1.1 trillion annually by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of 29% from 2025. “Compute is em...