Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher who left the company in 2024, filed his first 13F showing a portfolio concentrated in Bitcoin mining companies and power infrastructure providers. The filing marks a public-equity expression of his thesis that compute supply chains—not model architectures—will determine the next phase of both AI and digital-asset value creation. His fund's positions center on firms that own generation capacity, cooling systems, and colocation assets rather than the chip designers or cloud platforms.
The 13F lists holdings in MARA Holdings (formerly Marathon Digital), Riot Platforms, and Core Scientific, three of the largest North American Bitcoin miners by hashrate. Combined with stakes in Constellation Energy and Vistra, the portfolio reads as a bet on whoever controls the kilowatt-hours behind inference and proof-of-work. Aschenbrenner did not disclose position sizes in the initial filing, but the mandatory threshold for 13F reporting requires at least $100M in disclosed equity assets under discretionary management. Industry participants estimate the total commitment across these names approaches or exceeds $1B when accounting for off-exchange instruments and private co-investments in stranded-gas power projects.
The timing reflects a structural inflection in both markets. Bitcoin miners have spent the past eighteen months converting legacy ASIC facilities into GPU colocation sites, a shift Aschenbrenner appears to be underwriting through public equity. MARA began piloting AI inference clusters in Q3 2024; Riot announced a 300 MW GPU-capable facility in West Texas in November. Meanwhile, Constellation and Vistra have signed multi-year power-purchase agreements with hyperscalers, locking in capacity that would otherwise flow to residential grids or industrial users. Aschenbrenner's thesis appears to be that the firms with existing infrastructure—substations, interconnects, cooling loops—will capture margin that would otherwise accrue to new-build data-center REITs or vertically integrated cloud providers. The 13F also includes a position in Talen Energy, the utility that sold a 960 MW data-center campus to Amazon Web Services in March 2024, a transaction that effectively securitized stranded nuclear capacity.
Allocators should track whether Aschenbrenner adds to these positions in the next reporting period, due May 15, 2025. A second 13F showing increased concentration would signal conviction rather than exploratory positioning. Separately, watch for whether Bitcoin miners begin reporting AI revenue as a line item in Q1 earnings; MARA's April 28 call will be the first test. On the power side, monitor FERC rulings on behind-the-meter colocation arrangements—specifically, whether utilities can bypass grid upgrades by dedicating generation directly to data centers. Any regulatory clarity there would validate or impair the thesis behind Constellation and Vistra.
Aschenbrenner's public disclosure arrives as private-market participants quietly rotate out of foundation-model equity and into picks-and-shovels infrastructure, a move that typically precedes rather than follows edge compression in the underlying technology.