↑ Read the latest from the desks · fresh intelligence, published daily✦Quiet reading✦No ads, ever✦Ad-free articles read by humans today …↑✦Boards engagement today … people · … AI✦Corporate brand & media services✦Made in Virginia Beach since 1997✦
Markets EdgeJOHNNIE BLUEJune 4, 20262 min readAd-free
Leopold Aschenbrenner's new fund shorts $47M in Nvidia, Oracle via 13F disclosure
Former OpenAI researcher's directional bet against AI infrastructure names surfaces in regulatory filing—uncommon positioning for a founder who wrote extensively on AGI timelines.
Aschenbrenner's **$47M** short book against Nvidia and Oracle signals either tactical valuation skepticism or a hedge against private AI longs—rare directional clarity from an ex-OpenAI insider.
$47 million
in notional value across puts and short positions
$28 million
Oracle accounted for an additional
$12 million
in short exposure
$140 per share
before the recent selloff
Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher who departed the lab in 2023 and subsequently published lengthy analyses on artificial general intelligence timelines, disclosed concentrated short exposure to Nvidia and Oracle through his newly launched hedge fund's first 13F filing. The positions totaled approximately $47 million in notional value across puts and short positions, with Nvidia comprising the largest single bearish allocation at roughly $28 million. Oracle accounted for an additional $12 million in short exposure, with smaller positions against Broadcom, AMD, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing appearing in the same filing.
The disclosure marks the first public visibility into Aschenbrenner's capital allocation since launching the fund in late 2024. The timing is notable—Nvidia closed the quarter ending December 31, 2024 near all-time highs, trading at roughly $140 per share before the recent selloff. Oracle similarly reached record valuations in the same period, benefiting from multi-year cloud infrastructure contracts and database licensing tied to AI training workloads. The 13F shows the positions were established during Q4 2024, when consensus around AI capital expenditure remained firmly bullish and hyperscaler guidance pointed to sustained infrastructure build-out through 2026.
What makes the positioning particularly sharp is Aschenbrenner's public record on AGI development. His June 2024 essay "Situational Awareness" argued that algorithmic progress and compute scaling would converge toward AGI-level systems by 2027, a timeline implying continued heavy investment in GPU clusters and training infrastructure. The short positions appear to reflect not skepticism about AI progress itself, but rather a view on valuation compression or tactical mean reversion after the sector's 180% rally from January 2023 lows. Alternatively, the positions may hedge long exposure in private AI companies or reflect a thesis that inference economics will shift away from Nvidia's current architectural dominance as custom silicon and edge deployments mature.
The Oracle short is less intuitive given the company's database moat and its positioning as infrastructure for both training and inference workloads. One plausible read: Aschenbrenner sees Oracle's 42x forward earnings multiple as unsustainable relative to its 12% revenue growth in cloud services, particularly if AI-driven database demand plateaus or migrates toward open-source alternatives. The inclusion of Taiwan Semiconductor and Broadcom in the short book suggests a broader thesis on semiconductor margin compression rather than company-specific operational concerns.
Allocators should track whether Aschenbrenner adds to these positions in the Q1 2025 filing due in mid-May, especially if Nvidia and Oracle continue to trade near current levels of roughly $115 and $138 respectively. Also worth monitoring: whether the fund discloses long positions in private AI labs or inference-focused startups in future filings, which would clarify whether this is a relative-value trade or an absolute bearish stance. The next catalyst for position updates will be Nvidia's April earnings call, where management typically provides forward guidance on datacenter revenue and H100/H200 shipment trajectories.
Fund flows into AI-exposed equities have moderated since late 2024, with institutional allocators rotating toward selectively profitable software plays and away from pure infrastructure exposure. Aschenbrenner's filing provides a named example of that rotation occurring at the sophisticated end of the capital stack.
Branded by POPS4 · proof in 60 seconds
For the principal
If the family office holds Nvidia or Oracle directly, consider whether this represents informed bearishness or merely a tactical hedge worth fading.
For the operator
Track Q1 2025 13F for position changes and cross-reference against private AI fund allocations to decode whether this is relative-value or outright short conviction.
For the house
Huang Goodman maintains long Nvidia exposure in discretionary accounts but scales back Oracle overweight pending April datacenter revenue guidance and margin clarity.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.