USD.AI's June $98.1M Duos facility was set to close after GPU delivery

Why it matters

The SEC filing lays out how the Duos financing separated GPU collateral and operations from the parent company: Edge GPU owned and operated the equipment, while Hydra Host managed it. That structure gives operators and investors concrete details to assess, even as the filing leaves the loan's pricing and later closing status undisclosed.

On June 5th, 2026, USD.AI, the GPU-backed lending protocol developed by Permian Labs, provided $98.1 million in asset-based financing to Duos Edge AI-GPUaaS, LLC, according to a Duos Technologies filing with the SEC. The three-year facility was intended to support the deployment of 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPUs. USD.AI's June announcement identified Hydra Host as the deployment's manager.

The GPUs and related equipment owned by Edge GPU would serve as collateral. Duos described Edge GPU as a bankruptcy-remote special-purpose subsidiary; Duos Technologies Group pledged its equity in the subsidiary but generally would not be liable for the debt, except in specified "bad boy" events. Edge GPU would operate the infrastructure, while Hydra Host, Inc. would manage it, the SEC filing said. The filing did not disclose the facility's interest rate, fees or loan-to-value ratio.

The filing said closing was expected after the GPUs were delivered and installed, which it then expected to happen within 30 days. That was a forecast in the June report, not confirmation that the financing later closed; the filing does not establish its subsequent status.

The GPU deployment sits alongside a separate commercial agreement between Duos and Hydra Host. In a March 2026 SEC exhibit, Duos said the 36-month GPU-as-a-service contract was expected to generate about $176 million, with projected gross margins above 80% and expected annual EBITDA of about $40 million. The exhibit labels those figures as expectations and projections, not results. It described the customer as a leading global technology company, which Duos did not name publicly.

USD.AI's founders have framed the business around financing smaller AI infrastructure operators that may struggle to obtain conventional credit. USD.AI's 2025 Series A post identifies David Choi as Permian Labs' co-founder and CEO. Conor Moore, the co-founder and COO, has a background in private equity at Rockpoint and wrote that USD.AI had seen $13 billion in deals across more than 200 neoclouds over eight months. In the same July essay on compute financing, Moore estimated middle-market compute spending at $2 trillion through 2030. Those are company estimates, not independently audited market figures.

USD.AI reported more than $50 million in private-beta deposits in its August 2025 financing announcement, and said loans could clear in under seven days. USD.AI announced a roughly $13 million Series A led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Dragonfly, Arbitrum, Big Brain Holdings, CMT Digital, Hermeneutic Investments, FWL Capital and Flowdesk. Those earlier company-reported figures offer a snapshot of the platform before the Duos deal, rather than current usage metrics.

Specialized financing is drawing other entrants. TechCrunch reported in July that Upper90 financed a $400 million loan to General Compute using inference chips as collateral, and described Upper90's earlier GPU financing. The value of the hardware and the revenues it can support are central to deals like Duos's, while the filing leaves the price of USD.AI's credit undisclosed.

USD.AI has since announced a separate $128.9 million facility for an unnamed borrower, which it called the largest loan originated through its platform to date. The September 23rd announcement said that financing supports 32 NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems in British Columbia. USD.AI described the earlier Duos facility as its previous largest, placing the $98.1 million transaction in the context of a growing book of GPU-backed financing.