Ex-OpenAI researcher’s hedge fund reveals big Bitcoin miner bets in new SEC filing

Leopold Aschenbrenner has built a US stock portfolio heavily concentrated in companies that supply the power and infrastructure behind the artificial intelligence boom.

The former OpenAI researcher, who left the lab’s superalignment team to launch San Francisco-based hedge fund Situational Awareness LP, has grown it from $383 million in assets in early 2025 to a reported $5.52 billion in US equity positions in its latest 13F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund’s 13F filing for Q4 2025 shows a highly concentrated portfolio built around betting that the real winners of the AI boom won’t be chatbots, but the power plants and data centers that feed them. Situational Awareness reported $5.52 billion in US equity positions across 29 holdings, with a large share of that value clustered in a handful of AI infrastructure names.

Those include graphics processing unit (GPU) cloud provider CoreWeave, fuel cell and power specialist Bloom Energy, Intel, optics maker Lumentum, and Bitcoin (BTC) miner-turned-AI infrastructure play Core Scientific. 

Aschenbrenner first drew attention as a precocious AI thinker after publishing a widely read “Situational Awareness” manifesto on the race to advanced AI, then quickly parlayed that profile into capital. His San Francisco-based AI hedge fund now manages more than $1.5 billion, backed by prominent tech founders, family offices and institutions.

Aschenbrenner has been a substantial net buyer quarter over quarter, with Situational Awareness’s 13-F reported US equity and options portfolio rising from about $254 million in Q4 2024 to more than $5.5 billion by Q4 2025. Over that period, the fund built sizable positions in Bitcoin miners and related energy infrastructure firms such as IREN, Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, Bitdeer and Applied Digital.

Bitcoin miners pivot from hash rate to horsepower

The bet aligns with a broader shift already reshaping Bitcoin mining. After the latest halving squeezed block rewards, large miners have started repurposing their high-density, power-rich sites as AI hosting hubs, treating megawatts and data center space as scarce assets in the new compute economy rather than just hashrate.

Related: Hut 8 posts $279M Q4 loss despite surge in compute revenue 

Core Scientific, for example, has signed a series of 12-year high-performance computing hosting contracts with AI cloud firm CoreWeave, while MARA acquired a 64% stake in French computing infrastructure operator Exaion, expanding into AI and cloud services.

Situational Awareness disclosed a 9.4% stake in Core Scientific via an amended Schedule 13D, representing 28,756,478 shares with shared voting and disposition power, effectively giving the fund a levered bet on CoreWeave’s expansion and the miner’s pivot from pure Bitcoin to AI and high-performance computing.

At the same time, the fund has taken aim at the other side of the AI transition with a short position in Indian IT giant Infosys, a wager that large language models and AI coding tools will pressure the traditional outsourced software services model.

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