Situational Awareness LP Q1 2026 13F Filings: Explosive Growth to $13.7B – Doubling Down on AI Energy Infrastructure While Hedging the Semiconductor Layer

Situational Awareness 13F LP Q1 2026 13F: Explosive Growth to $13.7B – Doubling Down on AI Energy Infrastructure While Hedging the Semiconductor Layer

One of the most anticipated 13F filings of the season dropped today — and it delivered a masterclass in high-conviction, nuanced positioning.

Situational Awareness LP, the hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has just reported $13.68 billion in U.S. equity and options exposure for Q1 2026 (period ending March 31). That’s more than double the $5.52 billion disclosed at year-end 2025.

In under 18 months, Aschenbrenner has scaled a fund from a few hundred million to one of the most watched books on Wall Street. And today’s filing makes the thesis clearer than ever: the AI revolution is not about models or chips alone. It is about electrons — massive, reliable power at an industrial scale.

But the filing is more nuanced than a simple “power bull” story. The fund is doubling down on the physical infrastructure bottleneck while actively hedging the frothy semiconductor layer, known as a ‘Barbell Portfolio’ – a strategy that avoids ‘middle-of-the-road’ assets. Instead, it splits capital between two extremes: one consists of highly stable, defensive assets, while the other consists of highly aggressive, high-risk assets.

• Aggressive AI Longs: Extreme concentration in illiquid, high-upside physical AI infrastructure and energy suppliers.
• Aggressive Short Hedges: Highly leveraged derivative put options protecting against a macro collapse in generic semiconductor tech

From Viral Essay to Institutional Powerhouse

Back in June 2024, the then-24-year-old Aschenbrenner published his 165-page manifesto Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. He argued that AGI could arrive as early as 2027, with the real constraint being physical infrastructure, above all, electricity.

Most treated it as bold futurism. Aschenbrenner treated it as an investment mandate. He launched the fund, raised capital from the Collison brothers at Stripe, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross, and positioned capital exactly where bottlenecks would appear.

Today’s 13F is the clearest validation yet.

What the Q1 2026 13F Reveals – The Nuanced Thesis

The headline number is eye-watering: $13.68 billion in disclosed 13F securities, with the top 10 holdings representing 72.66% of the portfolio — extreme concentration that screams high-conviction.

Key themes:

• Energy infrastructure remains the core long bet. Bloom Energy continues as a flagship position (fuel cells delivering on-site power directly to data centres, bypassing the strained grid). Repurposed Bitcoin miners turned AI compute operators (Core Scientific, IREN, Cypher, Applied Digital), and optical components remain prominent. These are the facilities and solutions that can spin up gigawatts fastest.
• Compute-layer infrastructure scaling aggressively. Positions in Lumentum (optical networking) and similar names reinforce the physical backbone thesis.
• The sophisticated hedge – large put positions on semis. Here’s the important nuance: the fund holds a massive long position in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) — over 5.3 million shares. At the same time, it has taken significant put option positions on the semiconductor complex, including large SMH puts, NVDA puts, AVGO puts, ORCL puts, and others.

This is not an outright bearish call on chips. It is a risk-managed conviction. The fund is long the infrastructure that enables AI scaling while protecting against a potential pullback or rotation in the overheated, high-valuation semiconductor names that have already run hardest.

In merchant terms, they are supplying the picks, shovels, and the power plants — while hedging the cost of the gold itself.

Timing Is Everything – Nvidia Earnings This Week

The filing lands at the perfect moment. NVIDIA reports Q1 FY27 earnings on May 20 (Wednesday after market close).

Wall Street will focus on Nvidia’s guidance and Blackwell ramp. But the real story is that Aschenbrenner has been positioning for all along, which is what comes after the chips are sold. Every dollar of Nvidia revenue ultimately requires gigawatts of power. The puts provide downside protection if the chip layer gets frothy or rotates, while the infrastructure longs capture the real bottleneck.

The Merchant Mindset in Action

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 fund embodies that discipline at an institutional scale. The essay identified the bottleneck. The fund deployed capital there with conviction — and added smart hedging to manage the risks in the more speculative parts of the stack.

This is not random speculation. It is situational awareness translated into portfolio construction: high conviction on the power and physical infrastructure layer, protected against froth elsewhere.

What Traders and Investors Should Watch Next

1. Power and infrastructure names. Watch Bloom Energy and the Bitcoin-miner-turned-AI plays for sustained volume support and absorption signals.
2. NVIDIA earnings reaction. Any beat will intensify the power-bottleneck narrative — good news for infrastructure longs.
3. VPA signals. Look for lower wicks on declining volume (absorption) at support in the energy names, or high-volume narrow “Sumo” candles at resistance if the move is exhausted.
4. Broader rotation. The shift from pure “intangibles” to “tangibles” (power, compute capacity, physical infrastructure) remains one of the defining macro themes of 2026.

Final Thought

Leopold Aschenbrenner didn’t just write the essay that woke people up. He built the fund that is profiting from the reality he described — with sophisticated hedging to protect the thesis.

Today’s 13F is more than a quarterly update. It is confirmation that the AI gold rush is real, that money is being made by supplying the infrastructure the crowd cannot do without, and that smart risk management is being applied where valuations are stretched.

The intelligence explosion runs on electrons.

And Situational Awareness LP is positioned exactly where those electrons need to flow — while protecting the portfolio from the more speculative parts of the chain.

We’ll be watching the charts closely as this theme develops — and as always, VPA will reveal who is really accumulating and who is just along for the ride.  VPA tells us WHAT the chart is saying, and on this occasion, the 13F filings are giving us the WHY.

What do you think — is the energy infrastructure bottleneck still the single biggest overlooked opportunity in the AI story? Or does the semiconductor hedge change how you view the thesis? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

The merchant mindset wins again.

By Anna Coulling – creator of volume price analysis