Stripe has framed its planned acquisition of OpenRouter as part of a wider strategy to build economic infrastructure for what it calls the AI economy, linking AI model access, payments, stablecoins, wallets and usage-based billing into one stack. The payments company described OpenRouter as its largest-ever acquisition and said earlier it expects the deal to close in the coming weeks, while Axios has reported the price exceeds $8 billion and is being paid mostly in Stripe stock. In a new investor letter, Stripe said more than 5 million businesses use its products and that the company now handles payment flows equal to nearly 2% of global GDP. It argued that AI adoption is accelerating company formation, shifting businesses toward usage-based models and turning AI agents into economic actors, while stablecoins are spreading quickly and may become a native currency for AI activity. Stripe said those trends explain its recent acquisitions of Bridge, Privy and Metronome as well as OpenRouter, and outlined a broader product stack spanning service discovery and onboarding, usage management, payments and fund storage. The company also reiterated its long-term view that better economic infrastructure can support much larger global output, saying the world economy is now slightly above $100 trillion and that a $1,000 trillion economy is a useful benchmark for thinking about future bottlenecks.