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Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher turned hedge fund manager, has placed one of the most provocative bets in recent market history. His fund, Situational Awareness LP, held $13.67 billion in equity exposure as of March 31, 2026, nearly tripling from $5.52 billion at the end of 2025. The core thesis: former Bitcoin miners sitting on massive energy infrastructure are the real bottleneck play for AI scaling.
The 24-year-old’s top holdings read like a who’s who of companies that once ran warehouses full of ASIC rigs. IREN, Core Scientific, Riot Platforms, and CleanSpark all feature prominently in the portfolio, alongside energy firm Bloom Energy and compute company CoreWeave.
Power over chips
Aschenbrenner’s investing philosophy flips the conventional AI narrative on its head. His fund is betting that chips aren’t actually the scarce resource anymore. The real constraints on scaling AI, in his view, are power and land. Securing grid connections, building substations, getting site permits.
Former Bitcoin miners happen to own exactly those assets. They spent years negotiating power purchase agreements, locking down industrial sites near cheap electricity, and building out the cooling and electrical infrastructure needed to run thousands of machines at full tilt. Swapping out mining rigs for GPU clusters is, relatively speaking, the easy part.
Core Scientific has already begun that transition, announcing AI hosting arrangements including multi-year contracts expected to generate substantial revenue. The company went from bankruptcy in late 2022 to becoming one of the most talked-about AI infrastructure plays in under four years.
The semiconductor hedge
What makes Aschenbrenner’s positioning especially notable is the other side of the trade. Alongside his long bets on miners and energy, the fund reported roughly $7.46 billion in put options against semiconductor stocks.
The logic ties back to the same thesis. If power and physical infrastructure are the real bottleneck, then the market may be overpricing chip supply and underpricing everything downstream: the land, the energy, the permits, the cooling systems. A GPU sitting in a box doesn’t generate revenue. A GPU plugged into a rack in a facility with 200 megawatts of guaranteed power does.
From crypto to compute: the broader trend
CoreWeave, one of the fund’s other key positions, represents the pure-play version of this thesis. The company started as a crypto mining operation before transforming into a GPU cloud provider, and it has since attracted billions in financing to build out AI-focused data centers.
The inclusion of Bloom Energy in the portfolio adds another layer. Bloom manufactures solid oxide fuel cells that can provide on-site power generation, a potential solution for data centers that can’t wait years for utility grid upgrades.
The drawdown and what comes next
By mid-2026, Situational Awareness LP experienced sharp losses amid broader volatility in AI-linked stocks. The drawdown was significant enough to prompt a major liquidation of public equities through a transaction with Citadel.
For investors evaluating the miners in Aschenbrenner’s portfolio, the key metric to watch isn’t hash rate anymore. It’s megawatt capacity under contract for AI workloads, and the margin differential between mining a Bitcoin and renting a rack to an AI company.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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