A 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher has turned a gloomy essay about artificial intelligence into one of the hottest trades on Wall Street. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI hedge fund, Situational Awareness, now manages about $20 billion.
The fund gained roughly 270% after fees this year through May, according to figures reported by the Wall Street Journal. In plain terms, money left there in January would have nearly quadrupled by spring.
The Big Idea, Explained Simply
Think of the AI boom as a gold rush. Aschenbrenner is not betting on who finds the most gold. He is betting on whoever sells the shovels.
His shovels are electricity and computers. Powerful AI needs huge amounts of both. He argues those physical limits, not clever software, will decide who gets rich.
He laid this out in a 165-page essay in 2024, and it went viral. Some of the shovel sellers he favors are Bitcoin miners hosting AI instead of mining coins.
What the AI Hedge Fund Actually Owns
His biggest public holding is Bloom Energy, a company that makes fuel cells to generate power on site. He also owns CoreWeave, which rents out AI computing power, plus several former mining data centers now running AI.
Here is the clever twist. While betting on power, he is also betting against the chipmakers everyone loves. He has wagered more than $1.5 billion that Nvidia’s stock will fall, and over $2 billion against a basket of chip stocks.
Traders call these short bets. His reasoning is simple. Chip prices already assume everything goes perfectly, while the real shortage will be electricity.
The Anthropic Jackpot
His single largest position is not a stock at all. It is a private slice of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot.
He bought in during February 2025, when Anthropic was worth about $60 billion. By May 2026 that price tag had jumped to $965 billion after a fresh funding round. That one bet now makes up roughly a fifth of the whole fund.
His firm even shows up among Anthropic’s listed investors, and the AI maker has since moved toward an Anthropic confidential IPO.
Jane Street, a secretive trading giant that rarely backs outsiders, has also put money into the fund.
The Catch
Betting big on one idea cuts both ways. If companies slow their AI spending or the power crunch eases, the fund could fall just as fast as it rose.
That same risk hangs over Bitcoin miner AI stocks across the board.
For now the wager is paying off, and much rides on whether Anthropic’s soaring private valuation holds up. The coming months will show whether shovels really do beat gold.