Leopold Aschenbrenner just pulled off one of the wildest trades of the AI boom by betting on electricity, not algorithms.
The 24-year-old former OpenAI safety researcher was let go in 2024. He then published a 165-page essay arguing that AGI was coming far faster than investors realized and the real constraint would not be models or chips.
Aschenbrenner argued that the real bottleneck would be power and the winners of the AI race would be the players who control the energy that feeds the models.
His thesis became Situational Awareness LP, a hedge fund launched with roughly $225 million.
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In early 2025, Aschenbrenner began building a position in Bloom Energy Corp., a fuel cell company that generates power directly at data centers and sidesteps the overloaded grid.
By the end of 2025, Bloom had shifted from a fresh name in his book to his single biggest bet.
The fund’s most recent fourth quarter 2025 13F filing shows Bloom Energy as the fund’s largest holding, an approximately $875 million stake that made up about 10% of its equity portfolio.
The position reflected steady accumulation through 2025 at prices in the mid-teens per share. The market then started to catch up with his thesis.
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As investors woke up to the AI power crunch, Bloom Energy shares gained momentum.
On Tuesday, an expanded fuel cell deal with Oracle Corp. sent the stock sharply higher, closing almost 24% higher for a gain of more than 60% in the past week.
The once‑$875 million position now sits at roughly $2.21 billion and has become the centerpiece of Situational Awareness’ returns.
The fund’s other major positions echo the same electricity‑first logic with hundreds of millions in CoreWeave Inc. and a significant stake in Core Scientific.
Aschenbrenner has grown the fund from $225 million to roughly $5.5 billion dollars in about a year, according to SEC filings.
Most of Wall Street piled into model developers and chipmakers. Aschenbrenner focused on megawatts instead. So far, that call is paying off in spectacular fashion.
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