OpenAI whistleblower ditches Nvidia, AMD for crypto miners

Leopold Aschenbrenner is putting serious money against AI leaders.

The former safety researcher, who was fired from OpenAI in 2024, has revealed in the latest 13F filing that his fund Situational Awareness LP has more than doubled its disclosed equity exposure in the first quarter of 2026, growing from $5.5 billion at the end of 2025 to $13.67 billion by March 31.

Aschenbrenner had alleged that OpenAI was not taking security seriously enough around its most sensitive AI research and that this information could fall into the hands of foreign adversaries like China.

He argued that OpenAI's safety and security practices were inadequate given the stakes of what the company was building.

OpenAI disputed this, saying his termination was due to leaking confidential information, not due to raising safety concerns.

The whistleblower shot to prominence with his "Situational Awareness" essay series, in which he argued artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive as soon as 2027.

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Miners are the new data centers

Aschenbrenner's largest long positions are concentrated in companies building the power and computing backbone of the AI industry, many of which started life as Bitcoin (BTC) miners.

His disclosed stakes include IREN (NASDAQ: IREN), Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT), CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CSLK), Bitfarms, now known as Keel Infrastructure Corp (NASDAQ: KEEL), Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), and HIVE Digital (NASDAQ: HIVE).

But these are not purely crypto plays. In fact, each of these companies has spent the past year aggressively repositioning itself as a supplier of high-performance computing infrastructure for AI workloads, leveraging existing energy contracts and large-scale facilities at a time when AI data center demand is surging.

This is mostly because Bitcoin mining no longer sounds like a sustainable business model for many. Periodic Bitcoin halving, geopolitical price volatility, and energy supply crunch are eating into the miners' profit margin.

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Short the chips, long the picks and shovels

The other half of the trade is just as striking.

Aschenbrenner's put options against semiconductor companies and chip-related ETFs total approximately $8.46 billion.

His largest bearish position is a $2.04 billion put against the VanEck Semiconductor ETF, followed by a $1.57 billion put against Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and a $1.07 billion put against Oracle (NYSE: ORCL).