How a 24-Year-Old Made $5.5 Billion in One Year The market consensus has long been that betting on AI means betting on Nvidia. But 24-year-old German teenager Leopold Aschenbrenner @leopoldasch, who was fired from OpenAI, is now publicly challenging this belief with a $13.7 billion bet. Aschenbrenner was dismissed from OpenAI in 2024 over allegations of data leakage. In June of the same year, he published a 165-page paper titled “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” predicting the arrival of AGI by 2027. He then launched a fund named Situational Awareness LP, going long on AI chips, power infrastructure, and Bitcoin mining hardware—outperforming the S&P 500 with significant excess returns. Within a year, the fund’s assets under management grew from $225 million to $5.5 billion. The turning point came in the latest quarter. The Q1 2026 13F filing released on May 18 revealed an unprecedented move in the fund’s history: a massive short position in AI chip stocks. The fund’s total exposure expanded to $13.7 billion. On the short side, $8.46 billion in put notional value was deployed across the entire AI chip ecosystem: $1.6 billion on Nvidia, and $2 billion each on Broadcom, AMD, TSMC, Oracle, and the SMH semiconductor ETF. On the long side, he concentrated bets on upstream AI infrastructure: $934 million solely in Bloom Energy, plus positions in CleanSpark, Riot, Applied Digital, IREN, and CoreWeave—all focused on power generation, data centers, or Bitcoin mining hardware transitioning into AI compute. His core thesis in 2024 was this: Power has become the central constraint on AI supply. While most people think of chip limitations when considering AI bottlenecks, power may be the even bigger constraint. The story of selling shovels is over. The next story is about who powers the shovels. Watch the full video with @KayraMeow 👇📺