Managing a $13.6 billion fund! Why is this 24-year-old Wall Street AI investment prodigy heavily shorting NVIDIA?

Author: HIBIKI, Crypto City Former OpenAI researcher's hedge fund is heavily shorting Nvidia stock Situational Awareness LP, a hedge fund led by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner as Chief Investment Officer, recently released its 13F filing for Q1 2026 (Note). The report shows assets under management (AUM) reached $13.6 billion, more than doubling from the previously disclosed $5.5 billion, and reveals significant short positions against semiconductor ETFs and companies like Nvidia. According to a report by Business Insider, Situational Awareness LP has aggressively purchased put options to short AI hardware stocks. Its largest short position is in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), valued at approximately $2 billion. Selected put option positions held by Situational Awareness LP: - Nvidia: $1.56 billion - Oracle: $1.07 billion - Broadcom: $1 billion - AMD: $969.2 million - TSMC: $535.1 million (also holds $354 million in call options) - ASML: $494.1 million - Intel: $159.1 million Selected call option positions held by Situational Awareness LP: - SanDisk (Flash memory enterprise): $388.8 million - CoreWeave (AI cloud computing enterprise): $140.6 million - CleanSpark (Bitcoin miner): $104.5 million - Bloom Energy (Renewable energy enterprise): $55.3 million Note: The 13F report is a quarterly filing required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for institutional investors with over $100 million in assets under management, disclosing their holdings in U.S.-listed stocks and options. Why short AI semiconductors and pivot to mining companies? Situational Awareness LP is not only heavily shorting semiconductor chip manufacturers but also going long on cryptocurrency miners and AI cloud computing stocks. A report by Fitech Journal indicates that this strategy is closely tied to Aschenbrenner's 2024 thesis. He predicts that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be achieved by 2027. As AI models become more sophisticated, the bottleneck for future development will shift to the physical constraints of power grids and data centers, meaning the increase in computing power will no longer be the sole focus. Consequently, the Situational Awareness LP fund has chosen to avoid the potential risks associated with chip manufacturing and AI model development by establishing large-scale short positions in semiconductors. At the same time, the fund has shifted its long positions and call options toward energy companies and former cryptocurrency miners—such as CleanSpark and Riot Platforms—that are actively pivoting to AI data center operations. Because these companies possess large-scale power infrastructure, investing in them allows the fund to profit directly from the expansion of AI infrastructure. Further reading: 24-year-old fund manager achieves 24x annual return! His AI portfolio targets the "most scarce resource" Aschenbrenner accurately captures AGI expectations The 24-year-old Aschenbrenner is often hailed by the media as a "genius," having graduated top of his class from Columbia University at 19. He previously worked at the charitable foundation of the now-bankrupt FTX exchange before joining the OpenAI Superalignment team as a researcher. After being fired in April 2024, he published a sensational AI manifesto titled "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead" and founded his hedge fund. As a young man in his 20s with almost no traditional Wall Street fund management experience, he successfully convinced Silicon Valley heavyweights, including the Collison brothers of Stripe and former Meta AI head Nat Friedman, to invest in his fund based on his thesis. The AUM of his hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP, has expanded rapidly. Veteran hedge fund investors have marveled that Aschenbrenner’s understanding of AI public market investing is "more mature than anyone they have spoken to." Some former OpenAI colleagues and researchers have questioned Aschenbrenner’s lack of financial management experience, suggesting he is merely packaging AI safety threats as a marketing tactic to raise capital, and have expressed concern that his extreme arguments exacerbate tensions in the U.S.-China tech cold war. However, Aschenbrenner’s strength lies in his precise capture of the capital market's expectations for AGI and geopolitical anxieties, successfully converting them into massive financial influence. Now, the market is closely watching whether this extreme strategy of shorting semiconductors and betting on power infrastructure will yield lucrative returns or prove to be a phantom under a bubble. (The above content is excerpted and reprinted with authorization from our partner Crypto City. Original link)