Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino hints at challenging tech giants with investments in decentralized AI and brain-computer interfaces.
Tether (USDT), the largest stablecoin issuer by market capitalization, seems to want to seize the opportunity in the artificial intelligence race by investing in decentralized technologies and brain-computer interfaces to challenge the dominance of major tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon.
In a recent interview with WIRED, Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino discussed the firm’s evolving strategy, which now includes a big push into venture capital. Ardoino disclosed that Tether’s substantial profits, amounting to billions of dollars over the past two years due to rising interest rates, have prompted the firm to explore new investment opportunities.
“In the last 24 months, Tether has accrued around $11.9 billion profit. With this amount of money, we could have distributed it all to shareholders, to make everyone happy. Instead, part of it is being added to the reserve to further back the stablecoin, and the rest is basically being held in the investment arm.”
Paolo Ardoino
Ardoino emphasized that Tether’s venture capital efforts are guided by principles beyond traditional financial metrics and driven by the “ethos of decentralization,” and financial freedom that originally defined Bitcoin. He also suggested that decentralization could offer crucial independence in AI, which he described as “heavily politicized.”
“We are already seeing how AI is being heavily politicized. We believe that having a player independent of the classic actors — like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — is going to be very, very important.”
Paolo Ardoino
Tether plans to go beyond crypto-only
Tether’s venture investments will not follow a traditional venture capital model of seeking out high-risk, high-reward opportunities, Ardoino said, adding that the firm is more focused on projects that align with its vision of interdependence. He also underscored that over 90% of Tether’s profits will be reinvested in ventures that resonate with these values, rather than being distributed as “dividends.”
In March, Tether announced a new AI division, which Ardoino described as concentrating on “the development of open-source AI models and collaborating with other firms to integrate them into products that could address real-world challenges.” This initiative is part of a broader strategy that began in 2023 with Tether’s investment in Northern Data, a German public company that has expanded from crypto mining to providing computational resources for AI-driven data analysis.
Addressing potential concerns about investment risks, Ardoino assured that Tether’s investment approach involves rigorous due diligence, emphasizing the firm’s commitment to not only invest but also to actively support and, if needed, manage the companies it backs.
