BlackRock Links Crypto's Future To A $1.1 Trillion AI Cloud Boom

BlackRock says AI agents could drive fresh demand for stablecoins and blockchains, and sees tokenized computing power opening a new market as cloud revenue heads toward $1.1 trillion by 2030.

Key Points:

• BlackRock says AI agents will need machine-native payment rails, with stablecoins likely to lead.
• The firm sees claims on AI computing capacity becoming tradable digital assets.
• The authors warn agentic payments and compute markets are still at an early stage.

BlackRock Stablecoin Thesis

The world's largest asset manager laid out the case in a paper titled "The Machine-Native Economy," written by Will Su, Robert Mitchnick, Jay Jacobs and William Helm. The authors argued that AI agents, which plan and carry out tasks with little human input, will need payment tools built for machines rather than people. They expect stablecoins to lead.

Card networks and bank transfers already handle plenty of automation, the paper said, but opening an account can still require a person and merchant fees make tiny payments uneconomic. Card settlement and dispute finality can take longer still.

Stablecoins in circulation topped $300 billion as of September, according to the report. Adjusted stablecoin volume passed $11 trillion in 2025, broadly in line with the annual volumes of Visa and Mastercard. That still trailed the $93 trillion moved over the U.S. ACH network last year, though stablecoin volume grew about 80% a year from 2020 to 2025, against roughly 8.5% for ACH.