Few stories in the modern investment world are as compelling — or as consequential — as that of Leopold Aschenbrenner and his Situational Awareness LP fund.
What began as a 165-page manifesto published by a 22-year-old former OpenAI researcher has since evolved into one of the fastest-growing hedge funds in financial history, reshaping how Wall Street thinks about the artificial intelligence revolution.
If you’ve been searching for a definitive breakdown of the Leopold Aschenbrenner Situational Awareness fund, its investment thesis, portfolio holdings, and performance — you’ve come to the right place.
- Who Is Leopold Aschenbrenner?
- The Essay That Started It All: Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead
- Situational Awareness LP: Origins and Early Backers
- Explosive Growth: From $225 Million to $13.7 Billion
- The Core Investment Thesis: Bet on the Bottlenecks, Not the Headlines
- Portfolio Deep Dive: Top Holdings as of Q1 2026
- The Bloom Energy Trade: A Case Study in Thesis-Driven Investing
- Breaking: The Nebius Stake — Aschenbrenner’s Boldest Neocloud Bet Yet
- What Makes Situational Awareness LP Different
- Risks and Criticisms
- Conclusion: A Fund Built on a Thesis the World Is Still Catching Up To
Who Is Leopold Aschenbrenner?
Before we dig into the fund itself, we should first talk about the man behind it. Raised in Germany and born in 2001, Aschenbrenner finished Columbia University as the valedictorian of his class at 19 years old with degrees in both economics and mathematical statistics. By his early twenties, he was working as a lead researcher on OpenAI’s prestigious Superalignment team breaking cutting edge work in AGI.
At OpenAI’s supralignment group, Aschenbrenner worked until he was fired in April 2024 over an alleged leak of information (which he denies). Far from killing his career, his newfound free time after being fired allowed him to publish a document that would go on to become one of the most read in the AI investment space.
The Essay That Started It All: Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead
In June of 20 24, Aschenbrenner self-published a 165-page monograph titled Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. He argued that governments and investors needed to appreciate how soon AGI could come and what was risked if the U.S. lost its lead. Fortune Every dollar spent catching up will come from innovation dollars.”
Within it he shared his vision for AGI. “Everyone is talking about AI. Few have even the vaguest notion of what’s about to hit them. We will have superintelligence, properly speaking.”
The essay made five primary assertions including the exact “Counting the OOMs” framework Aschenbrenner uses to predict AGI by 20 27, three multiplicative vectors — compute, algorithmic efficiency, and “ unhobbling” — and the test-time compute insight explaining why chatbots become drop-in remote workers.
He has made the full essay available for free as a PDF at situational- awareness.ai. It became one of the most widely read documents among the AI investment community in 2024 and 2025.
Situational Awareness LP: Origins and Early Backers
Nat Friedman, Meta AI’s Head of Product; Daniel Gross, who co-leads Meta Compute; Patrick Collison and John Collison, cofounders of Stripe; and many others from Silicon Valley all made seed investments in Situational Awareness LP Aschenbrenner started.
Named Latticework, the fund is based in SF and operates as a hedge fund that Aschenbrenner runs alongside Carl Shulman. Its thesis? That AGI will develop much faster than people think, with vast economic consequences. Kernel It’s a public-market oriented long/short equity hedge fund with a macro overlay. It’s not a venture fund, although it does have some private investments.
The firm started in September 2024 with just under $225 million in capital. What happened after that was historic.
Explosive Growth: From $225 Million to $13.7 Billion
The fund’s rapid growth is nearly unparalleled for a first-time fund. At the end of 20 25, Situational Awareness LP increased its disclosed U.S. equity book to $5.52 billion, up roughly 22-fold in just one year.
The fund’s reported 13F for 31 March 20 26 totaled $13.68 billion, already up from $5.52 billion in the previous reporting period.
Impressively, the portfolio produced a total return north of 100% year-to-date as of early 2026, and is over 96 percentage points of alpha versus the S&P 500. The fund also reports a 2025 return of +2,065%.
Aschenbrenner has personally committed nearly all of his net worth to the fund. Family offices, institutions and endowments have also provided capital alongside founders, primarily from the West Coast.
The Core Investment Thesis: Bet on the Bottlenecks, Not the Headlines
What’s different about Situational Awareness LP is where it’s placing its bets. Instead of heavily weighting “AI buzzword companies” — the obvious Nvidias and Microsofts — Aschenbrenner thinks differently.
That’s shown through his huge stakes in power generators like Vistra and Constellation Energy, infrastructure bets like Bloom Energy and CoreWeave, and… everyone’s favorite semiconductor index fund. He bets on one core idea: “It’s not algorithms that are going to be the bottleneck…It’s electrons.”
This premise is expanded on in his essay Situational Awareness, where he posits that long-term, data centers, chips, and power grids will be what limits AI growth, not algorithms.
“When I say ‘AI,’ I mean AGI: Artificial General Intelligence.” Here’s how the core infrastructure bets break down:
- Electrical Infrastructure: Data centers need power. Investors who can provide (or produce) that power at scale will be rewarded handsomely, especially if they can sidestep crowded power grids.
- Compute: Build enough AI models and eventually your bottleneck won’t be algorithms. It’ll be servers, cooling systems, networking equipment, and storage.
- Shorting semis: Of course, the fund was net shorts in semis. They shorted companies they believed were going to have their margins competed away, but remained long on certain chip and electrical infrastructure plays.
Portfolio Deep Dive: Top Holdings as of Q1 2026
Situational Awareness LP has 42 holdings according to its latest 13F filing with the SEC. This portfolio snapshot is from 31 March 2026. The fund has $13.68 billion in total assets with turnover of 5%.
Key holdings consist of Bloom Energy, SanDisk, CoreWeave, IREN Limited, and Core Scientific.
The fund also sold short dramatically on the semiconductor sector as a whole. As of the end of Q1 2026, Situational Awareness had $8.46 billion of notional put exposure to dozens of chipmaker stocks, led by $2 billion to VanEck Semiconductor ETF, $1.6 billion to Nvidia, and others to Broadcom, Oracle, AMD, Micron Technology, ASML Holdings, Intel, Corning Glass Works, and Taiwan Semiconductor.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Aschenbrenner playbook, however, is that he is among the most bullish on AGI’s arrival while also being one of the biggest short sellers of the very chip companies most investors believe will profit from it.
By selling short chipmakers, he believes that once AI infrastructure is played out, chip companies will engage in hyper-competition that will hurt margins—and as such, many of these semiconductor valuations are hard to justify today.
The Bloom Energy Trade: A Case Study in Thesis-Driven Investing
Maybe no investment exemplifies the Situational Awareness playbook more than its stake in Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy’s solid-oxide fuel cells create a pathway to powering data centres: onsite, scalable power generation that can be installed quickly at hyperscale facilities.
That lets them sidestep constrained utilities and gain access to predictable baseload electricity 24/7. Per the fund’s 13F filings, Situational Awareness took a position in Q4 2025 ahead of another 176% surge in the name.
This is the type of first-mover opportunity that a fund with real technical insight into AI infrastructure can capitalize on, instead of buying whatever the brokerage research desks are talking about.
Breaking: The Nebius Stake — Aschenbrenner’s Boldest Neocloud Bet Yet
One of the latest big moves in Situational Awareness comes from the fund’s now public investment in Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS). This position was also not listed on the fund’s Q1 20 13F so it was picked up after the end of the quarter.
Late in trading on Monday, May 28, Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness revealed its beneficial ownership in Nebius Group. The fund now owns about 12.41 million shares of the company (5.6%).
Shares were purchased at $197.73 per share. Nebius now makes up 15.21% of the firm’s 13F portfolio and is one of the larger positions that SA holds.
With this position, Situational Awareness now ranks among Nebius’ biggest institutional holders along with BlackRock which holds a stake of 4.5% of the company.
Why Nebius?
Nebius is Europe’s largest AI compute provider, and has landed a series of large partnership deals in recent months — signing a $27 billion agreement with Meta in March 2026 to supply it with $12 billion worth of dedicated capacity and up to $15 billion of flexible compute capacity over the next five years. The company also recently closed a $2 billion investment from Nvidia.
Reorganized last year to focus on AI infrastructure, Nebius revenue grew 351% to $530 million in 2025. The company is expected to grow its sales at a 242% annual rate from 2025 to 2028 to $21.2 billion, becoming profitable in the latter year.
Nebius’ stock had already run up nearly 170% year-to-date when the trade was first revealed. “The stock was trading at about 19 times forward sales. For Aschenbrenner to pay a premium to own stock at that valuation really shows you how highly he thinks about the neocloud infrastructure play,”
Investors keeping score with Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBAS) will be interested to see how this latest move by Situational Awareness LP, which qualified as one of the firm’s largest shareholders after the trade, affects thoughts on the name’s positioning in the AI supply chain. Shares popped on the news and have continued climbing higher. To date, NBIS stock is up 165% year-to-date and about 475% over the past year.
It also illustrates how Aschenbrenner is continuing to evolve his definition of what qualifies as “infrastructure.” Nebius isn’t a simple data centre landlord. As a vertically integrated AI cloud provider playing at the convergence of compute, networking and model deployment, it straddles a different segment of the AI buildout than something like a straight power play such as Bloom Energy (NASDAQ: BE) or even a Bitcoin miner like IREN.
What Makes Situational Awareness LP Different
Lots of hedge funds are trumpeting their investments in “AI infrastructure” these days. We think Aschenbrenner is unique for several reasons:
Deep technical expertise: Aschenbrenner worked at one of the largest AI research labs in the world for years. He understands model training dynamics, scaling laws, and infrastructure bottlenecks from direct experience, not second-hand from analyst reports.
High conviction: The fund is concentrated—only 24 stocks as of Q1 20- and tilts toward AI support plays instead of the low-hanging, high-flying AI names like Nvidia and Broadcom that everyone else is buying. sourceThe Motley Fool
True skin in the game: Aschenbrenner has reportedly invested almost all of his net worth into the fund.
Going long (lots of) of bad news: The $8.46 billion of semiconductor put options isn’t risk management — it’s a direct, aggressive bet that investors have massively mispriced the chip sector.
Acting quickly on conviction: The Nebius position was initiated after the stock had already risen 170% in 2026. Most managers would sit on the sidelines at that valuation. Aschenbrenner bought anyway — and the stock climbed further still.
Risks and Criticisms
There’s no sweet-talking your way around risks in a Situational Awareness LP investment thesis. An honest appraisal includes a risk register, six detailed ways this thesis could fail—including a 14-to-1 implied leverage ratio most reports don’t cover.
None of Situational Awareness LP’s core thesis bets have been proven yet. The AGI-by-2027 bet looks entirely reasonable if you work in the technical AI space. But there’s no guarantee of success. Delayed timelines—due to regulatory crackdowns, a happy path plateau or some geopolitical black swan—would undermine the buildout of this future economy, hurting power/compute positions that anchor the portfolio.
The semiconductor short is also high-risk, high-reward. If semiconductor valuations don’t compress, and actually continue expanding, those put options could become a large headache for performance.
Furthermore, the fund grew from $225 million to $13.7 billion in fewer than two years. Could there be structural limits to alpha generation at this size? Position sizing will be much more of a concern going forward.
Conclusion: A Fund Built on a Thesis the World Is Still Catching Up To
The Leopold Aschenbrenner Situational Awareness portfolio is not your typical hedge fund. Neither is its manager your typical fund manager. SA is a contraption of concentrated capital rooted in an intricate, articulated, and deeply-held worldview. That world hinges on two ideas: AGI is arriving much sooner than people think it will and the physical world will have to be radically upgraded to bring it online.
From early power plays like Vistra and Constellation Energy, to compute infrastructure bets like CoreWeave and Core Scientific, to the latest foray into Nebius Group’s neocloud platform — each investment has described a story about electrons, datacenters, and compute being at the core of AGI.
If you’re an investor looking into the fund’s 13Fs, an AGI researcher seeing your life’s work echoed in their investments, or simply someone wondering “who is this 24-year old wunderkind that suddenly has $14 billion under management?” — the story of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund is one you need to know.
The manifesto anticipated everything we’re talking about. SA is betting on it.
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