Ex-OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund has doubled to $13.67b, with Bitcoin miners as its top long positions.
Summary
- Aschenbrenner’s Q1 2026 13F filing shows equity exposure rising from $5.5b to $13.67b, with miners including IREN, Core Scientific, and Riot Platforms among the top longs.
- The fund simultaneously opened $7.46b in put options against Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle, and the VanEck Semiconductor ETF.
- Aschenbrenner’s thesis targets Bitcoin miners for their power grid access and land, which AI companies urgently need for data center buildout.
Aschenbrenner, who was fired from OpenAI in 2024 over an alleged information leak, filed the fund’s Q1 2026 13F with the SEC on May 15, with the regulator accepting it on May 18. The document shows disclosed equity exposure more than doubling from $5.52 billion at end-2025 to $13.67 billion as of March 31.
The largest long positions span Bitcoin miners IREN, Core Scientific, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Bitfarms, Bitdeer, and Hive Digital, alongside energy and compute plays Bloom Energy, SanDisk, and CoreWeave. As Fortune noted in its March profile, the thesis holds that “the most valuable assets in the AI era may not be algorithms, but electricity and computing power.”
Bitcoin miners as AI infrastructure
Aschenbrenner’s investment logic holds that AI buildout will be bottlenecked by power and land, not chips. Bitcoin miners already hold high-density power sites and grid access that AI companies cannot replicate quickly. His 165-page “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead” paper argued that compute infrastructure, not model development, would determine the pace of AGI progress.
The trend is reshaping reported earnings across the sector. As crypto.news reported, TeraWulf’s AI and HPC hosting revenue of $21 million outpaced Bitcoin mining revenue for the first time in Q1 2026. Core Scientific, among Aschenbrenner’s disclosed holdings, has announced plans to repurpose its Pecos site into a 1.5GW AI data center campus, repurposing 300MW of existing mining capacity.
Why the semiconductor short matters
Alongside the miner longs, the fund opened $7.46 billion in put options against the chip sector. The largest positions were $2.04 billion against the VanEck Semiconductor ETF, $1.57 billion against Nvidia, $1.07 billion against Oracle, and $1.01 billion against Broadcom, the filing shows.
The pairing makes the thesis internally consistent: if AI value accrues to power sites rather than chip makers, semiconductor valuations face compression even as infrastructure operators gain.
Crypto.news documented this broader miner pivot in an earlier analysis of firms leaping into HPC, noting that companies from Bitdeer to Riot are accelerating the conversion of mining facilities into AI data centers. Full Q1 holdings data is available at the Situational Awareness LP 13F tracker on 13f.info.
