Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Surges After Trump Teases $500 Billion OpenAI Plan

The price of World currency (WLD) jumped 25% on Wednesday to $2.40who led the crypto market after President Donald Trump teased a $500 billion AI investment initiative around industry giant OpenAI.

Trump said during a press conference On Tuesday, it was announced that a new company called the Stargate Project will invest “at least” $500 billion over the next four years in AI infrastructure for ChatGPT maker OpenAI, such as data centers being built in the heart of Texas.

Private sector companies such as OpenAI, Oracle and Japanese conglomerate Softbank are among Stargate’s initial equity investors, according to a survey. joint press release. The company has also chosen Microsoft and Nvidia as technology partners.

“This infrastructure will secure U.S. leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate tremendous economic benefits[s] for the whole world,” said Stargate.

To be clear, Tuesday’s announcement did not specifically mention the World project, formerly known as Worldcoin (the WLD token still goes by that name). The eyeball scanning project, launched by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2023, is building a digital identification platform that uses biometrics and cryptography.

Still, Worldcoin’s market capitalization soared past $2.2 billion on Wednesday, with AI-related projects also receiving bids from traders. One of the biggest winners was Virtuals, a tokenized protocol AI agents that saw its VIRTUAL token increase in price by 20% $3.06.

While some traders believe AI will fuel the next crypto revolution, the so-called “metabuilt around AI agents and their associated meme coins seemed to be in jeopardy recently, as the president’s newly launched meme coin took center stage and drained liquidity from other coins.

But a crypto-friendly government that also encourages investment in AI has traders excited as AI agents show signs of success, Bitwise Senior Investment Strategist Juan Leon told me. Declutter.

“The $500 billion could translate into investments that boost crypto and AI synergies, allowing America to become the dominant leader in these two critical technologies,” he said.

Crypto trading firm Wintermute described Trump’s announcement on Tuesday as “surprising,” pushing traders toward AI-related coins such as Aixbt (AIXBT) and the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET), which includes Collect.ai‘s decentralized machine learning network.

The excitement around AI wasn’t limited to the cryptosphere: Nvidia’s stock price rose 3.6% that day to $146. Shares of Oracle, meanwhile, rose 6% to $183 on Wednesday.

Edited by Andrew Hayward