Blockchain investor YZi Labs has taken an equity stake in USD AI, a yield-bearing synthetic stablecoin whose dollar value is backed by tokenised computing resources, AI hardware and network nodes. The size of the investment was not disclosed. USD AI, which markets an annual percentage rate of about 7% and reports roughly $63 million in total value locked, previously raised $13 million from a group of early-stage crypto and venture investors. The fresh capital is intended to expand the protocol’s real-world collateral base and broaden lending to smaller artificial-intelligence infrastructure providers. The move extends YZi Labs’ recent push into blockchain infrastructure. Earlier on Tuesday the firm joined Republic Capital in a $15 million funding round for Hemi, a project building interoperability between the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.