Hedge Fund Manager Bets $13 Billion on Bitcoin Miners' Energy Assets for AI Compute
Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher turned hedge fund manager, has made a bold bet on the future of AI compute infrastructure. 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 is that former Bitcoin miners sitting on massive energy infrastructure are the real bottleneck play for AI scaling. Aschenbrenner's fund is betting that chips aren't actually the scarce resource anymore; instead, power and land constraints are holding back AI growth.
Aschenbrenner's top holdings include IREN, Core Scientific, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Bloom Energy, and CoreWeave. These companies have already begun transitioning their infrastructure to support AI workloads, with Core Scientific announcing multi-year contracts expected to generate substantial revenue.