Leopold Aschenbrenner's $5.5 billion AI fund bets heavily on data center power and infrastructure stocks, not chip makers — portfolio up 150% to 2,800% this year

Leopold Aschenbrenner, former OpenAI researcher, launched Situational Awareness in 2024 with $250 million and has grown it to $5.5 billion as of Q1. His 24-stock portfolio focuses on unsexy infrastructure plays (energy, cooling, storage, data centers) rather than famous AI chip names like Nvidia. The fund's largest bet is Bloom Energy (16% of portfolio), a company that provides backup power systems for AI data centers using fuel cell technology.

These infrastructure stocks have massively outperformed the broader market in 2024: Bloom Energy is up 150% year-to-date, Sandisk up 284%, and Lumentum (which makes optical equipment for data transfer) up 143%. The common thread: companies that switched from supporting cryptocurrency mining to powering AI model training and running inference (the step where an AI produces an answer). For example, Core Scientific and Iren both pivoted their data center operations away from crypto to chase AI demand.

This signals where AI's real bottleneck lies — not in chips themselves, but in the physical infrastructure to power and cool massive AI training operations. For business professionals and investors, this reveals that the most profitable AI bets may not be the headline AI companies, but the overlooked utilities, real estate, and equipment suppliers that make AI infrastructure actually work at scale.