Author: DLNews

Translation: ShenChao TechFlow

ShenChao Introduction: 24 years old, fired by OpenAI, managing a $5.5 billion hedge fund—Leopold Aschenbrenner has placed nearly 20% of his position on Bitcoin miner stocks, but his logic is not based on bullish sentiment for coin prices; rather, he sees the industrial-grade electrical infrastructure that miners possess as something AI companies desperately want but cannot obtain. With new data centers taking three to five years to come online, miners' access rights to the power grid are becoming more valuable than Bitcoin itself.

The full text is as follows:

Leopold Aschenbrenner manages a $5.5 billion hedge fund.

This 24-year-old fund manager has nearly 20% of his position on Bitcoin miners.

But his bet is on the infrastructure and grid access required by AI.

Bitcoin miners have just received a $1 billion vote of confidence from an unexpected source: a former OpenAI researcher.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, 24, was fired by OpenAI in 2024 for alleged information leaks. Through his $1 billion hedge fund Situational Awareness LP, he has established a series of positions in the Bitcoin mining sector.

According to the latest filings submitted by the fund to the SEC, Situational Awareness LP currently has a scale of $5.5 billion, with approximately $1 billion invested in Bitcoin miners.

Aschenbrenner's $1 billion bet is one of the largest institutional investments in Bitcoin miners in recent months. However, analysts say this indicates that the true asset of this industry has never been Bitcoin, but rather electricity.

"The real value of miners has always been their energy infrastructure and grid access," Nishant Sharma, founder of the mining and computing consulting firm Blocksbridge, told DL News, "In the current market, the valuation of underlying energy infrastructure often exceeds the potential Bitcoin it could produce."

As AI companies scramble for electrical capacity, well-known miner stocks have fallen to multi-year lows. Aschenbrenner, who was once a member of FTX's Future Fund charity team, sees immense value in Bitcoin companies that possess gigawatt-level industrial power.

Aschenbrenner's timing for entry could not be more perfect.

Following the 2024 halving, which will cut block rewards in half, the income of Bitcoin miners has continued to be under pressure. A lack of on-chain activity has further worsened their situation, leading to a continuous shrinkage of transaction fee income.

Miners are therefore turning to AI—riding the wave of this trend—selling Bitcoin and abandoning the business model they relied on.

Shareholders of Bitcoin miners are now demanding that they accelerate the transition to AI.

Aschenbrenner did not respond to interview requests.

Aschenbrenner's portfolio shows that he holds multiple heavy positions in the Bitcoin mining sector.

These include Core Scientific, Iris Energy, Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, and Hut 8, which have a combined investment of about $1 billion and are actively transforming into AI-focused Bitcoin miners.

Essentially, he targets those Bitcoin miners that have already made substantial steps towards the AI field.

Core Scientific signed a 12-year contract with AI cloud service provider CoreWeave, expected to generate $10 billion in revenue; IREN aims to achieve over $500 million in annualized AI cloud service revenue by early 2026; Riot has recently also shifted its focus to AI and high-performance computing, signing a 10-year data center lease with AMD.

The economic logic behind this transformation cannot be ignored. If this trend continues, AI hosting will bring predictable stable income, while Bitcoin mining relies on volatile cryptocurrency prices and fierce competition.

"Aschenbrenner's bet makes sense," Sharma said.

Competing for Power

AI faces a major problem: there is a severe shortage of electricity.

Reports suggest that training OpenAI's GPT-4—one of the more popular large language models on the market—consumes over 12 megawatts, equivalent to the electricity usage of approximately 12,000 households.

Future models are likely to require more.

Obtaining this power is extremely difficult. In the United States, connecting new data centers to the grid usually takes three to five years, partly due to layers of processes such as environmental reviews, grid research, transmission upgrades, and local permitting.

These timelines seem far-off. At this point, Bitcoin miners are stepping in.