Why Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI hedge fund is betting big on power companies and bitcoin miners to fuel the ‘superintelligence’ race

When Fortune profiled Leopold Aschenbrenner in October 2025, the former OpenAI researcher—famously fired after roughly a year at the company—and onetime member of FTX’s Future Fund philanthropy team was best known for a self-published 165-page monograph titled Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. That essay, published in 2024, argued that governments and investors needed to recognize how quickly AGI, or artificial general intelligence, could arrive—and what was at stake if the U.S. fell behind. 

Less than two years later, Aschenbrenner is running a multibillion-dollar hedge fund based on the principles in that essay. And according to the fund’s most recent filings, released in February, those principles are currently steering him to make big bets on the kinds of massive power-generation plays that will be needed to give AGI a chance of becoming reality.

In the introduction to his essay, Aschenbrenner sketched a future he claimed was visible only to a few hundred prescient people, “most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs.” Not surprisingly, he included himself among those with “situational awareness,” while the rest of the world had “not the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them.” To most, AI looked like hype or, at best, another internet-scale shift. What he insisted he could see more clearly was that LLMs were improving at an exponential rate, scaling rapidly toward AGI, and then beyond to “superintelligence”—with........

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