David Choi
David Choi is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Permian Labs, a company that develops financial protocols and operates hardware infrastructure. He is also the co-founder of USD.AI, a stablecoin lending platform designed to provide credit to artificial intelligence companies using graphics processing units (GPUs) as collateral.[1]
Education
David Choi studied at the University of Southern California, where he earned dual undergraduate degrees. He completed a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a focus on Finance from the Marshall School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History. He also attended Rutgers Business School, graduating in 2017; while there he participated in the Rutgers Business School Center for Real Estate and founded the Real Estate Society at Rutgers.[3][4]
Career
Early Career and Real Estate
While at Rutgers, Choi was active in real estate student organizations, founding the Real Estate Society and participating in the Rutgers Business School Center for Real Estate, experiences that preceded his later career.[4]
Investment Banking and Alternative Assets
Earlier in his career, Choi worked in investment banking at Deutsche Bank (2016–2018), contributing to transactions including Unibail-Rodamco’s $24.7 billion merger with Westfield Properties and Scientific Games’ $632 million acquisition of NYX Gaming. He also held roles at the Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, focusing on growth equity in precision agriculture, and at ArtAssure Ltd., conducting art market research and supporting fine art finance and advisory services.[1] [4][3]
Taureon and Early Crypto Involvement
Before founding Permian Labs, Choi was active through Taureon (since 2016), where he focused on blockchain research, mempool activity, and early-stage investments in projects such as Memeland, Ethena, Neutron, XAI Games, Chainflip, and Algorand. He was also recognized as a winner at ETHGlobal’s HackMoney 2021 hackathon.
Permian Labs and USD.AI
David Choi is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Permian Labs, established in 2021 alongside Conor Moore and Ivan Sergeev. At the company, he oversees strategic direction and its two primary divisions: the USD.AI protocol and Tactical Compute, a hardware infrastructure business. Under his leadership, USD.AI was developed to provide financing to smaller and emerging AI firms through loans collateralized by GPU hardware. The protocol issues USDai, a U.S. dollar–pegged stablecoin, and sUSDai, a yield-bearing version backed by compute revenue. By 2025, Permian Labs had raised $38 million in funding, managed $60 million in hardware globally, and facilitated more than $358 million in loan volume. In August 2025, the company announced a $13 million Series A funding round led by Framework Ventures with participation from investors including Dragonfly and Arbitrum.[1][2] In 2026, under Choi’s leadership USD.AI reported $492.1 million in total value locked (roughly $500 million) by the end of August, with sUSDai supply surpassing $400 million, lifetime deployed capital reaching $281.8 million, and $22.4 million in cumulative yield generated for sUSDai holders.[5] That month, USD.AI also secured a $100 million stablecoin-based debt facility from Bullish to support additional GPU-backed financings, with Bullish planning to list sUSDai across multiple trading pairs to deepen secondary liquidity.[6][5] In May 2026, Permian Labs conducted significant CHIP token buybacks linked to the USD.AI ecosystem, repurchasing 338,806,273 CHIP from investor allocations and bringing cumulative buybacks to 3.71% of total supply.[7] Choi has also represented USD.AI at industry events such as CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong 2026 and in interviews and essays outlining the “interest rate of intelligence” thesis and roadmap for USD.AI.[8][9][10]
