AI Economy Can Jumpstart Dollar Stablecoin Dominance, AMRO Economists Warn

Two economists from the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) suggest that the winner in the artificial intelligence (AI) race will be the nation that manages to establish the currency that AI models and infrastructure will be based upon. Chengxu Fu and Xiaguo Huang propose that pricing AI compute, energy for datacenters, and AI infrastructure in U.S. dollars could lead to increased dollar dominance through stablecoins.

The first channel is straightforward: if companies need to pay for all things AI with dollars, and AI becomes a far larger industry, a renewed global demand for dollar liquidity will surge. The second channel involves stablecoins as programmable money for automated AI agent payments. Dollar-pegged stablecoins could provide the settlement that agentic commerce requires, the economists explain.

These channels might coincide, as agentic systems could settle AI-linked compute payments in stablecoins, establishing a positive dollar loop. While stablecoins are not the only dollar proxy available, they may benefit from early network effects, as tokenized deposits or CBDCs are not yet ready. This would also increase demand for U.S. Treasuries used as collateral to support stablecoin market capitalization.

The report calls on ASEAN+3 nations—including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and others—to limit dependence on this dollar loop by establishing regional data centers and developing tokenized forms of money based on local currencies.

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/stablecoins/ai-economy-can-jumpstart-dollar-stablecoin-dominance/