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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Big Idea, Explained Simply <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What the AI Hedge Fund Actually Owns <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Traders call these short bets. His reasoning is simple. Chip prices already assume everything goes perfectly, while the real shortage will be electricity.<\/p>\n
The Anthropic Jackpot <\/p>\n
His single largest position is not a stock at all. It is a private slice of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
His firm even shows up among Anthropic’s listed investors, and the AI maker has since moved toward an Anthropic confidential IPO.<\/p>\n
Jane Street, a secretive trading giant that rarely backs outsiders, has also put money into the fund.<\/p>\n
The Catch <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That same risk hangs over Bitcoin miner AI stocks across the board.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Read the Original story Anthropic Stake Drives This AI Hedge Fund to $20 Billion and 270% Gains<\/a> by Lockridge Okoth at beincrypto.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher has turned a gloomy essay about artificial intelligence into one of the hottest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66459,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[37509,53,12054,37508,12053,12052,3737],"class_list":["post-66458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-ai-hedge-fund","tag-anthropic","tag-aschenbrenner","tag-bitcoin-miners","tag-leopold-aschenbrenner","tag-situational-awareness","tag-the-wall-street-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}