Financing deal worth nearly $100M fuels Jacksonville company’s AI infrastructure deployment (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Almost $100 million in asset-backed debt financing will support Jacksonville-based Duos Technologies Group’s largest GPU deployment project in its history.
Forged between the local company (Nasdaq: DUOT), manager Hydra Host and financier USD.AI, the agreement is structured in a way that isolates risk from Duos’ corporate balance sheet while providing the capital required to scale AI infrastructure deployment.
It completes the project’s stack, finalized in March: Duos deploys and operates the physical Edge Data Centers, Hydra Host manages GPU-as-a-Service distribution and operations, and USD.AI provides asset-backed debt financing.
“Adding USD.AI’s on-chain financing to this deployment closes the loop on what a modern AI Factory requires,” Duos Technologies Group CEO Doug Recker said. “Asset-backed, transparent, and structured to protect our balance sheet, this is the type of capital infrastructure deployment demands.”
This specific agreement is a commercial partnership between Duos and Hydra Host. USD.AI is supplying a $98.1 million, three-year debt facility to support the project, the company announced Thursday.
The GPU-as-a-Service contract is expected to generate approximately $176 million in revenue over a 36-month term, an initial $18 million customer pre-payment, projected gross margins exceeding 80% and expected annual EBITDA of approximately $40 million.
The first phase also includes an initial 4.3 MW colocation commitment from a “leading global technology company,” per Duos, which will serve as the project’s anchor tenant.
Instead of taking years to construct a center, Recker said Duos builds what it calls data center “pods” in off-site facilities before delivering them to substations where excess power is already available.
A traditional data center takes between $10 million to $12 million per megawatt to construct, Recker said, whereas Duos lands between $6 million to $7 million.
Once delivered, a crane sets the modular pod in place, technicians connect power and fiber and the site can go live almost immediately — dramatically shortening deployment timelines. Hydra calls them AI factories.
“AI Factories require capital that moves at the speed of AI demand,” Hydra Host CEO Aaron Ginn said. “USD.AI brings the financing layer our operators need, non-dilutive, on-chain, and fully transparent. Together with Duos Edge AI’s deployment expertise and our Brokkr platform, we can scale this model across every market where AI infrastructure is needed.”