Le plus grand bénéficiaire de la montée en flèche de l'IA, l'histoire de la fortune du nouveau roi des IPO américains Leopold

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s holdings have once again exploded, as a rising star in hedge funds, his investment logic is being validated in reverse by the market.

Over the past few days, several stocks in Leopold’s Situational Awareness LP publicly disclosed holdings have collectively risen: Bloom Energy, Cipher Mining, Intel, Applied Digital, SanDisk, IREN, etc., with single-day gains exceeding 10%, prompting the market to revisit his late-2022 13F report, trying to understand why this former OpenAI researcher preemptively bet on AI infrastructure.

What is worth noting about him is not the “young” or “overnight wealth” labels, but that he offers a framework different from mainstream AI trading. Most people equate AI investments with Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, and model capabilities, but Leopold’s portfolio bypasses the most crowded star assets, turning instead to Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, Core Scientific, Lumentum, Intel, Bitcoin miners, and power-related companies.

The AI narrative is shifting from “whose model is stronger” to “who can support the model’s continued expansion.” Training and inference require GPUs, GPUs need data centers, data centers need electricity, land, cooling, fiber optics, licenses, and long-term power contracts. Leopold is betting on the physical bottlenecks that AI growth must pass through. Fortune summarizes his latest holdings as: this ex-OpenAI researcher is translating his AGI paper into billion-dollar bets on power, AI infrastructure, and crypto miners.

In early March, Dongcha Beating conducted an in-depth analysis of Leopold and his fund’s holdings and investment logic, sharing his vision of the future AI competition landscape. All of this is being validated in reality: the AI narrative is returning from models on screens to land and power grids underfoot. The most expensive things in the future may not be algorithms, but the physical world supporting their continued expansion.

Below is the original content from Dongcha Beating:

In February 2026, hedge fund Situational Awareness LP submitted its quarterly holdings report, showing that as of the end of Q4 2025, the fund’s US stock holdings had a total market value of $5.517 billion.

Wall Street manages trillions of dollars in assets, and $55 billion is just a drop in the ocean. But this fund’s management scale was less than $400 million a year earlier, and its founder and CIO is a young person born in 1999.

His name is Leopold Aschenbrenner. 27 years old.

In 12 months, he grew this fund from $383 million to $5.517 billion, an increase of over 14 times. During the same period, the S&P 500 rose by single digits.

What is even more surprising is his holdings. Opening the quarterly report, you won’t find any AI star companies that you often see in financial news headlines. Instead, there are companies making fuel cells, Bitcoin miners just emerging from bankruptcy, and chip giants being abandoned by the market.

He says his fund invests in AI, but this doesn’t look like an AI fund’s holdings; it more resembles a madman’s shopping list.

But this madman is precisely one of the earliest and most profound people in the world to understand how AI will change the world. Before joining Wall Street, he was a researcher at OpenAI, thinking about how to ensure AI doesn’t go out of control when it becomes smarter than humans; later, he was expelled for saying things he shouldn’t, writing a 165-page manifesto predicting a future that most would find absurd.

Later, he bet his entire net worth on it.

Dissecting $5.5 billion: what exactly did he buy?

The most direct way to understand Leopold Aschenbrenner’s investment genius is to open his holdings report and read it line by line.

His largest holding is Bloom Energy, with a market value of $876 million, accounting for 15.87% of the total portfolio.

This company makes fuel cells. More precisely, it produces a type called “solid oxide fuel cells,” which can directly convert natural gas into electricity with high efficiency. Founder KR Sridhar was once an engineer on NASA’s Mars exploration program, named one of “Five Top Futurists Creating the Future” by Fortune magazine.

An AI fund has placed its biggest bet on an energy company.

According to Gartner’s forecast, the global power consumption of AI-optimized servers will soar from 93 TWh in 2025 to 432 TWh in 2030, nearly fivefold in five years. The US data center power demand will nearly triple by 2030, reaching 134.4 GW. Meanwhile, the US power infrastructure is over 25 years old on average, with many components aged between 40 and 70 years, far beyond their designed lifespan.

In other words, the electricity needed by AI exceeds what the entire grid can supply. Yet the grid itself is aging rapidly and close to breaking down.

The most scarce resource in the AI era is not chips, but electricity.

Bloom Energy’s fuel cells can bypass this bottleneck. They don’t need to connect to the grid, generating power directly next to data centers, 24/7. In 2025, Bloom Energy secured a contract from CoreWeave to supply fuel cells for its AI data center in Illinois.

Speaking of CoreWeave, this is Leopold’s second-largest holding.

He holds $774 million in call options on CoreWeave, plus $437 million in common stock, totaling over $1.2 billion, or 22% of the portfolio. CoreWeave is a GPU cloud service provider, transformed from a crypto mining farm.

In 2017, Mike Intrator and Brian Venturo and a few others mined Bitcoin together. In 2018, the crypto crash made mining impossible. But they had a bunch of GPUs. In 2019, they had a flash of inspiration: GPUs can do more than mine—they can run AI.

So the company pivoted, transforming from a mining farm into an AI compute provider. On March 27, 2025, CoreWeave IPO’d on Nasdaq, raising $1.5 billion at $40 per share. A company that emerged from mining has become a core supplier of AI infrastructure.

Leopold is interested in CoreWeave’s large GPU inventory and its deep ties with Nvidia. In an era where compute power equals productivity, whoever owns GPUs is king.

But what truly confuses people is his third-largest holding: Intel. Market value $747 million, all call options, accounting for 13.54% of the portfolio.

In 2025, Intel was one of Wall Street’s most unloved companies. Its stock price halved from its 2024 high, market share was eaten by AMD and Nvidia, and CEOs changed repeatedly. Almost all analysts declared Intel finished.

But Leopold bet on call options at this moment. This is an extremely aggressive move—if right, it soars; if wrong, it hits zero.

What is he betting on? Just two words: foundry.

In November 2024, the US Department of Commerce announced that Intel would receive up to $7.86 billion in direct funding through the Chips and Science Act. The goal was to make Intel a domestic chip foundry competing with TSMC.

In the context of US-China tech decoupling, the US needs a “homegrown” chip maker. Although lagging, Intel is the only choice. Leopold is betting not on Intel’s technology, but on US national will.

The subsequent holdings are even more interesting: Core Scientific, $419 million; IREN, $329 million; Cipher Mining, $155 million; Riot Platforms, $78 million; Hut 8, $39.5 million.

All these companies share a common trait: they are all Bitcoin miners.

Why would an AI fund invest in a bunch of Bitcoin miners?

Simple: because Bitcoin miners have access to the cheapest electricity and largest data center sites in the US.

Core Scientific has over 1,300 MW capacity. IREN plans to expand by 1.6 GW in Oklahoma. These miners have locked in the cheapest power globally through long-term power purchase agreements to survive fierce compute competition.

And now, what AI data centers most lack is precisely electricity and space.

In 2022, Core Scientific filed for bankruptcy due to the crypto crash. It restructured in January 2024, reducing about $1 billion in debt, and relisted on Nasdaq. Then, it signed a 12-year, over $10.2 billion contract with CoreWeave, transforming its mining farms into AI data centers. To fully pivot, Core Scientific even plans to sell all its Bitcoin holdings.

IREN (formerly Iris Energy) signed a $9.7 billion AI contract with Microsoft, receiving $1.9 billion in advance. Cipher Mining signed a 15-year lease with Amazon. Riot Platforms signed a 10-year, $311 million contract with AMD.

Overnight, Bitcoin miners have become landlords of the AI era.

Now, let’s complete this puzzle.

Bloom Energy provides power, CoreWeave supplies GPU compute, Bitcoin miners offer space and cheap electricity, Intel provides domestic chip manufacturing. Plus, the fourth-largest holding Lumentum ($479 million, optical components, core interconnects for AI data centers), ninth-largest SanDisk ($250 million, data storage), and eleventh-largest EQT Corp ($133 million, natural gas producer fueling fuel cells).

This is a complete AI infrastructure supply chain.

From power generation, transmission, chip manufacturing, GPU compute, data storage, to fiber optic interconnects—every link he has covered.

And he is doing another thing that makes this logic clearer: in Q4 2025, he completely sold off Nvidia, Broadcom, and Vistra. These three companies were among the biggest winners in the 2024 AI rally.

He also shorted Infosys, one of India’s largest IT outsourcing firms.

Selling the hottest AI chip stocks, buying power plants and mining farms that no one wants. Shorting traditional IT outsourcing because AI programming tools are making programmers more efficient, reducing outsourcing demand.

Every transaction points to the same conclusion: the bottleneck of AI is not software, but hardware; not algorithms, but electricity; not cloud models, but the physical world.

So, how did a 27-year-old form this understanding?

From East German doctor’s son to OpenAI rebel

Leopold Aschenbrenner was born in Germany, to parents who were doctors. His mother grew up in East Germany, his father from West Germany; they met after the Berlin Wall fell. This family itself bears the mark of a historical rupture—Cold War, division, reunion. His obsession with geopolitical competition perhaps finds its roots here.

But Germany couldn’t keep him. He later said in an interview: “I really wanted to leave Germany. If you’re the most curious kid in class, wanting to learn more, teachers won’t encourage you—they’ll be jealous and try to suppress you.”

He calls this phenomenon “High Poppy Syndrome,” where the taller you grow, the more likely you are to be cut down.

At 15, he convinced his parents to let him fly alone to the US, to Columbia University.

Fifteen and attending college—an anomaly anywhere. But Leopold’s performance at Columbia turned “outsider” into “legend.” He majored in economics and math-statistics, winning awards like the Albert Asher Green Memorial Prize, Romine Economics Award, and becoming a Junior Phi Beta Kappa member.

At 17, he wrote a paper on economic growth and existential risks. Renowned economist Tyler Cowen read it and said: “When I read it, I couldn’t believe it was written by a 17-year-old. If it were a PhD thesis from MIT, I would be equally impressed.”

At 19, he graduated as valedictorian from Columbia, the highest honor for undergraduates. In 2021, still under the shadow of the pandemic, a 19-year-old German boy delivered the commencement speech at Columbia.

Tyler Cowen gave him a piece of advice: don’t pursue a PhD in economics.

Cowen felt academia had become somewhat “decadent,” encouraging him to do bigger things. He also introduced him to Silicon Valley’s “Twitter oddball” culture—an obsession with AI, effective altruism, and humanity’s long-term fate.

After graduation, Leopold first joined the Forethought Foundation, researching long-term economic growth and existential risks. Then he joined the FTX Future Fund, founded by SBF, working alongside key figures in effective altruism like Nick Beckstead and William MacAskill. His title was “Economist affiliated with the Oxford University Future of Humanity Institute.”

This experience was crucial. It meant that before entering AI, Aschenbrenner had spent years systematically contemplating a question: what kind of event could fundamentally change the course of human civilization.

Then he joined OpenAI.

The exact timing is unclear, but he was part of a special team—the “Superalignment” team. Founded on July 5, 2023, led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and team lead Jan Leike, its goal was to solve the alignment problem of superintelligence within four years, ensuring that an AI far smarter than humans would still obey human commands.

OpenAI had promised to allocate 20% of its compute power to this team. But there was a gap between promise and reality.

Leopold saw some unsettling things inside OpenAI. He submitted a security memo to the board warning that the company’s safety measures were “severely inadequate” to prevent foreign governments from stealing key algorithm secrets. The company’s response surprised him: HR called him in, saying his concerns about espionage were “racist” and “unconstructive.” The company lawyers questioned his views on AGI and his team’s loyalty.

In April 2024, OpenAI fired him for “leaking confidential information.”

The so-called “leak” was a brainstorming document on AGI safety he shared with three external researchers. Leopold said the document contained no sensitive info; sharing such documents internally for feedback was normal.

A month later, Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI. Three days after, Jan Leike also departed. The Superalignment team was disbanded, and the promised 20% compute power was never delivered.

A team researching “how to control superintelligence” was dismantled by the very company creating superintelligence.

The irony is undeniable. But for Leopold, being fired was a form of liberation. He was no longer employed, no longer had to be cautious in internal memos. He could speak openly to the world.

On June 4, 2024, he published a 165-page article on a website called situational-awareness.ai titled “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”—“态势感知：未来十年.”

165 pages of prophecy

To understand Leopold’s investment logic, you must first read this manifesto. Because