The Guy Who Got Fired From OpenAI Is Now Moving Markets

Leopold Aschenbrenner got canned from OpenAI in April 2024. He says it was retaliation for an internal memo warning about foreign espionage risks at the company. OpenAI says he leaked confidential information. Either way, he walked out the door and immediately got to work.

He published a 165-page essay titled "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead" — predicting Artificial General Intelligence could arrive as early as 2027. Then he launched a hedge fund by the same name. Three months after getting fired, he was managing billions.

Now, according to his firm's 13F filing published May 18, Situational Awareness LP is sitting on $13.6 billion in equity exposure — more than double the $5.5 billion it held at the end of December 2025, per CNBC TV18.

The Short Side: He's Betting Against the AI Darlings

Aschenbrenner isn't just another AI bull buying Nvidia and riding the wave. He's actively shorting the biggest names in the AI infrastructure trade. According to Business Insider, his firm's 13F filing reveals the following put-option positions as of Q1 2026:

• Nvidia: $1.56 billion
• VanEck Semiconductor ETF: $2.04 billion
• Broadcom: $1 billion
• Oracle: $1.07 billion
• Advanced Micro Devices: $969.2 million
• Taiwan Semiconductor: $535.1 million
• ASML: $494.1 million
• Intel: $159.1 million

These are multi-billion-dollar bets that some of the market's most beloved AI stocks are overpriced. Put options profit when the underlying stock falls. Aschenbrenner is essentially betting the market has gotten ahead of itself on the chip trade.

He's not alone. Business Insider notes that "Big Short" investor Michael Burry also revealed a short position against Nvidia in late 2025. Short seller Culper Research published a bearish report on Nvidia last week flagging issues tied to China.

The Long Side: Infrastructure and Energy, Not Hype

Aschenbrenner's thesis focuses on what he sees as the real bottleneck for AI development: not software or models, but physical infrastructure — electricity, compute capacity, and data center buildout. While he's shorting the chip stocks that everyone else is buying, he's going long on the picks-and-shovels plays.

According to CNBC TV18, Situational Awareness holds a $878 million position in Bloom Energy, which makes fuel cell technology for power generation. He's also long Bitcoin mining firms IREN and Core Scientific, as well as cloud compute provider CoreWeave.

And then there's Nebius.

Why Nebius Popped 9-11% Thursday Morning

On Wednesday, a regulatory filing revealed that Situational Awareness now owns 12.4 million Class A shares of Nebius Group — a 5.6% stake in the Dutch AI cloud provider, according to CNBC.

The market noticed immediately. Nebius shares jumped between 9.6% and 11% in premarket trading Thursday, depending on which source you read. The stock is already up 149% year-to-date.

Nebius isn't a random pick. The company has been quietly assembling serious partnerships. In March, it signed a $27 billion deal with Meta — $12 billion in dedicated compute capacity plus up to $15 billion in additional capacity over five years, per CNBC. That same month, Nvidia invested $2 billion directly into Nebius for AI infrastructure collaboration.

Last week, Nebius announced a $2.6 billion deal with Bloom Energy to deploy fuel cell technology at its U.S. data centers — solving for the energy constraint problem that Aschenbrenner has emphasized. Aschenbrenner is also long Bloom Energy.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Most outlets — including CNBC — are framing this as a simple "ex-OpenAI employee backs AI stock, stock goes up" story.

The actual story is a coherent macro bet: Aschenbrenner thinks the current AI hardware trade is a bubble, and that investors are crowding into Nvidia while the real value sits in energy infrastructure and compute providers that the market hasn't fully priced.

He's shorting the consensus trade and going long the overlooked infrastructure layer. It's a sophisticated, internally consistent thesis — whether you agree with it or not.

Also buried in the coverage: Aschenbrenner says his firing from OpenAI was about foreign espionage warnings, not a simple leak. He wrote an internal memo flagging what he believed were insufficient security protocols and potential Chinese intelligence risks at OpenAI. OpenAI disputed this characterization. The mainstream press largely treated his firing as a footnote — but his concerns about AI security and foreign adversaries deserve more scrutiny.

What This Means for Regular People

If Aschenbrenner is right, the stocks in every retail investor's AI-themed ETF — Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD — are overvalued relative to the energy and compute infrastructure required to actually run AI at scale.

If he's wrong, he's sitting on billions in put options that will expire worthless while Nvidia keeps printing.

Either way, this is a bet from someone who built his career understanding what AI actually needs to function. He's watching the infrastructure layer that few financial commentators are covering.