U.S. Bancorp has created a Digital Assets and Money Movement unit, marking one of the clearest signs yet that traditional American banking is being pulled into a new era shaped by tokenization, blockchain rails, and the rapid rise of stablecoins.

Announced in mid-October 2025, the new division places the bank squarely inside a global shift that has financial institutions scrambling to modernize their infrastructure before the next generation of money movement leaves them behind.

Stable-coin adoption is sweeping across the world, transforming from a niche experiment into a financial utility. U.S. lenders, in particular, are racing to build internal capabilities. The momentum is being fueled by the popularity of dollar-backed digital tokens, which are now settling everything from cross-border remittances to corporate treasury transfers. Even conservative institutions that once kept blockchain at arm’s length are rolling out pilots or forming internal teams to prepare for widespread use of tokenized deposits, programmable payments, and instant settlement systems.

U.S. Bancorp’s move fits neatly into this new reality. With more than six hundred billion dollars in assets, the bank cannot afford to fall behind rivals that are already deploying blockchain systems. JPMorgan runs its own tokenization network. Citigroup has built tokenized cash settlement tools. Global institutions from Europe to Asia are rolling out similar initiatives.

The result is an industry-wide rush to ensure that banks—not fintech startups—control the pipes that will carry the next evolution of digital money.

The new division at U.S. Bancorp will be led by payments veteran Jamie Walker, who currently heads Merchant Payment Services. He will remain in that role until a successor is named, after which he will step into his new position under Chief Digital Officer Dominic Venturo.

Venturo said the bank’s customers, especially corporates and institutions, increasingly want to understand how digital assets can help them move money safely, store value efficiently, and interact with tokenized instruments in a regulated environment. The new structure is designed to meet that demand with a long-term focus rather than piecemeal experimentation.

The organization intends to develop blockchain-based tools that support stablecoin activity, tokenized assets, and advanced digital payment rails. That includes research into issuing or integrating stablecoins, exploring tokenized real-world assets that settle instantly, and constructing on-chain money-movement infrastructure capable of supporting both domestic and cross-border flows.

The unit will also oversee custody and settlement services for cryptocurrencies, enabling U.S. Bancorp to serve institutional clients seeking compliant exposure to digital assets. Internally, it will coordinate innovation efforts across the bank to ensure all blockchain projects meet regulatory and risk-management standards.

The establishment of this division sends a message to the wider market. While crypto markets have weathered cycles of hype and collapse, the technology underneath—especially the rails powering stablecoins—has only grown more entrenched. Dollar-backed tokens now settle hundreds of billions of dollars in monthly transactions globally.

Large corporations have begun experimenting with on-chain treasury operations. Payment companies are integrating stablecoins directly into their products. And financial regulators in major economies, including the U.S., are edging toward more structured frameworks that would allow banks to issue or custody tokenized dollars.

This shift explains why financial institutions are moving quickly. Stablecoins offer faster settlement, lower transaction costs, and programmable features that traditional payment systems cannot match. As adoption widens, banks risk losing relevance if they fail to own the infrastructure powering the new digital-money ecosystem.

Bancorp joining the fray, setting up a division dedicated to digital assets, signals that tokenized markets, stablecoins, and digital-money rails are expected to become permanent financial instruments rather than speculative experiments. For a bank of its size, the new unit is not just a response to competition—it is a bet that the next major transformation in global finance will happen on distributed ledgers, and that institutions prepared today will have the advantage tomorrow.

The AI chip wars tightened on Tuesday after The Information reported that Meta Platforms is in talks to buy billions of dollars’ worth of Google-designed processors for its data centers starting in 2027 — a move that would break Meta’s heavy dependence on Nvidia and thrust Google into the center of the global semiconductor contest.

The report triggered immediate ripples across financial markets. Nvidia shares fell about 4% in premarket trading on Tuesday, extending pressure from the day before as investors digested the prospect of a giant customer like Meta diversifying away from its GPUs. Alphabet rose 4.2% in early trade, adding to a more than 6% rally on Monday, as investors cheered the possibility that Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) could finally break into the mainstream hardware market beyond Google’s own fleet. Broadcom, which helps Google design its TPUs, gained more than 2% after an 11% surge the prior day.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC: “Google Cloud is experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and NVIDIA GPUs; we are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”

Google launched its first-generation TPU back in 2018, originally built for its own internal cloud computing needs. Since then, the company has rolled out increasingly advanced generations of the chip, each tailored to handle larger and more complex AI workloads. TPUs are fully customized AI processors — a design choice that experts say gives Google an efficiency advantage when training or deploying models.

If Meta adopts TPUs at scale, it would amount to a major endorsement of Google’s technology and instantly place Google as a serious challenger to Nvidia’s supremacy.

The talks, according to The Information, include Meta potentially renting Google’s chips through Google Cloud as early as next year. That arrangement would allow Meta to begin shifting some workloads long before the 2027 hardware rollout.

The negotiations also fall under Google’s broader strategy to sell or lease TPUs directly to customers for use in their own data centers — a departure from the company’s earlier approach of keeping TPUs exclusive to Google facilities.

Winning Meta would be one of Google’s biggest coups yet. Meta is one of Nvidia’s largest customers and is planning between $70 billion and $72 billion in capital spending this year alone, much of it dedicated to AI infrastructure. A carve-out of that budget for TPUs would open a vast new commercial pipeline for Google’s chips.

The implications for Nvidia, though not immediately existential, are significant. Nvidia remains the undisputed market leader in AI hardware, with its graphics processing units powering the generative AI boom. Its ecosystem is entrenched: more than 4 million developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform, which has made its GPUs the default foundation for training and running advanced AI models. Analysts say that dominance will not be overturned soon.

But the surge in global demand for compute — coupled with tight supplies and rising costs — has pushed companies to hunt for alternative suppliers. Google’s TPUs, Anthropic’s move to use up to one million Google chips, Amazon’s custom Trainium and Inferentia processors, and the resurgence of AMD have together begun chipping away at Nvidia’s previously unchallenged position.

Meta’s potential pivot shows how aggressively firms are trying to diversify their supply, both to cut costs and to reduce exposure to one hardware vendor. A Meta–Google deal would send a strong signal through the industry that custom silicon is becoming a central part of long-term AI strategy.

Alphabet’s market surge on Tuesday also reflects broader enthusiasm around Google Cloud, which has gained momentum from strong customer demand, recent high-profile partnerships, and positive early reviews for Google’s new Gemini 3 model. The cloud unit has also drawn heavyweight backing from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and has started turning a once-marginal division into an engine of profitability.

The share-price moves unfolded amid an ongoing debate over whether the AI boom is showing signs of a bubble. Nvidia sits at the center of that conversation. The company reported a stronger-than-expected sales forecast last week, yet tech stocks broadly slipped afterward as traders questioned how long current valuations can hold.

Still, for now, any sign that a top-tier AI player like Meta is exploring hardware alternatives is enough to shift markets. This points to how fluid the competition has become in an industry where companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute.

Before AI can advance, microprocessors must advance first. Before an evolution in software can unfold, chips must evolve. In other words, for software to eat the world, hardware must first cook the meal. The entire promise of the AI era rests on faster, more capable microprocessors. Microprocessors are foundational, catalytic, and indispensable in modern technology.

Tekedia Capital is excited to announce our investment in US-based Partcl, a company building breakthrough tools that dramatically accelerate chip design by reducing compile times from weeks to minutes.

Today, the chip design cycle still takes 18–24 months, forcing hardware engineers to chase rapidly evolving AI models with outdated tooling. Partcl is changing that. Their GPU-accelerated system uses physics-based simulations that run 700× faster than traditional Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software. They also generate synthetic datasets to train AI models capable of producing superior chip designs.

The outcome is profound: faster design cycles, higher-quality chips, and a significantly shorter time to market. Partcl sits at the core of the future where advanced chips unlock advanced AI. Partcl, welcome.