From Viral Essay to $5.5 Billion Hedge Fund: Leopold Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” Bets on AI Energy Infrastructure

From Viral Essay to $5.5 Billion Hedge Fund: Leopold Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” Bets on AI Energy Infrastructure

Hi everyone – and in this post I explain how Leopold Aschenbrenner turned his 2024 manifesto into Situational Awareness LP — a hedge fund now reporting $5.5B+ in 13F filings focused on energy infrastructure for AI. The real “picks and shovels” of the intelligence explosion.

One of the most keenly awaited 13F filings this week is from the hedge fund Situational Awareness. An unusual name for a hedge fund, but one with an extraordinary back story.

At the time of writing, the fund’s latest holdings have not yet been published, and I will return to them in my next post, as the featured stocks will tell us much about what is happening in the AI space.

In June 2024, a 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher named Leopold Aschenbrenner published a 165-page essay titled Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. This wasn’t just another dry, academic AI think-piece. Instead, it was a stark, detailed warning — and a roadmap — arguing that artificial general intelligence (AGI) isn’t decades away. It could arrive as early as 2027, followed quickly by superintelligence.

The essay went viral. But Aschenbrenner didn’t stop at writing.

He acted.

Less than 18 months later, he had built Situational Awareness LP, a hedge fund that has grown its disclosed U.S. equity book from roughly $225 million in late 2024 to over $5.5 billion by the end of 2025 (as per the Q4 2025 13F filings).

But here’s what makes this story so compelling for traders and investors:

The fund is not loaded up with the usual suspects — Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Meta. Instead, Aschenbrenner has concentrated the portfolio on the one thing the entire AI revolution cannot live without: massive, reliable electricity.

The Real Bottleneck: Electrons, Not Algorithms

In the essay, Aschenbrenner laid out the brutal physics of scaling AI. Training and running the next generation of models will require gigawatt-scale compute clusters — facilities that consume more power than entire cities. The existing grid simply cannot cope. The build-out needed is on an industrial scale: new power generation, transmission upgrades, on-site solutions such as fuel cells, and the repurposing of existing infrastructure (including former Bitcoin mining sites).

This is where Situational Awareness LP has placed its biggest bets.

As of the end of Q4/early 2025 (when the 13F filing was released), Aschenbrenner’s book showed a heavily concentrated book focused on energy infrastructure for AI:

• Bloom Energy (BE) — the fund’s largest position (over $875 million, ~16% of the portfolio). Solid-oxide fuel cells that deliver clean, on-site power directly to data centres, bypassing the strained grid.
• Repurposed Bitcoin miners turned AI compute operators (Core Scientific, IREN, Cipher Mining, Applied Digital).
• Optical components, storage, and other critical “picks and shovels” that enable the physical build-out.

In gold-rush terms, while everyone else is chasing the gold (the flashy AI models and chips), Aschenbrenner and his backers (including Stripe’s Patrick & John Collison, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross) are selling the picks, shovels — and the power plants that run the entire operation.

This is a textbook MM play.

Why This Matters for Traders and Investors

As VPA practitioners, we constantly look for the real supply and demand dynamics — not the narrative, but the effort versus result on the chart. Aschenbrenner’s thesis and the fund’s portfolio perfectly illustrate the shift I have covered in some of my X posts: the move from “intangibles” (software, hype) to tangibles (power, infrastructure, physical capacity).

The AI revolution isn’t just about code. It’s about electrons. And the market is only just waking up to the scale of the infrastructure mobilisation required.

This is why energy infrastructure names tied to AI have seen explosive moves — and why the “picks and shovels” analogy is an accurate description of where the real money is being made in this cycle.

The Bigger Picture

Aschenbrenner didn’t just predict the future in his essay. He positioned capital to profit from the bottlenecks he identified. That is ‘situational awareness’ in its purest form — and a powerful reminder for all of us. And for those of you who may not be aware, ‘situational awareness’ is a foundational military and defence term. Originally coined by the US Air Force, it refers to the ability to understand a combat environment – including enemy and friendly forces, terrain, and weather – in real-time in order to make quick, effective decisions.

The concept typically consists of three stages:

1. Perception: Observing cues and gathering data from the environment (much like what we do as traders and investors).
2. Comprehension: Putting the pieces together to understand what is currently happening – again, similar to joining the data points before entering a position, whilst always remembering we don’t always have a complete picture.
3. Projection: Using that understanding to anticipate what will happen next.

In trading and investing, the greatest edges often come not from following the crowd into the obvious names, but from understanding what the crowd will need to make their bets work.

Energy infrastructure for AI is one of those foundational needs.

Not only will I be watching how this theme plays out across the charts — and how volume-price analysis reveals the real accumulation and distribution as the build-out accelerates — but also the extent to which the holdings in Situational Awareness have changed since the last reported filings in January 2026. One of the downsides of the filings is that they are three months out of date, so we can never know the current position. So far, there are no plans to shift them to a monthly basis. However, the SEC has introduced a new rule that short sales must be reported monthly.

What do you think? Is the energy bottleneck the biggest overlooked opportunity in the AI story right now? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

Welcome to the new reality of the intelligence explosion. It runs on power.

By Anna Coulling – creator of volume price analysis

By Anna Coulling – creator of volume price analysis