Compiled & translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Hosts: Josh Kale; Ejaaz Ahamadeen
Podcast source: Limitless Podcast
Original title: Forget NVIDIA | This 24-Year-Old's $4.5B Bet on AI's Real Problem (Leopold Aschenbrenner)
Broadcast Date: March 4, 2026
Key points summary
Everyone's been talking about Leopold Aschenbrenner lately—24 years old, $5.5 billion AI hedge fund, the darling of the US stock market. But most of the discussion stays at the level of "he's amazing" and "he's made a lot of money," with very little real analysis of his investment logic.
Two months ago, the Limitless Podcast did an episode where they analyzed his 13F report point by point:
Why did we sell off our entire Nvidia position? Why did we invest 20% of our portfolio in a fuel cell company? Why did we buy up a bunch of Bitcoin mining companies? Why did we short Infosys? At the time, this episode generated almost no discussion. Looking back now, many of the predictions made have come true, making it worth reviewing.
Summary of key viewpoints
Investment performance of Leopold Aschenbrenner
“Last year he was managing $1 billion in funds… Today, just one year later, that $1 billion has grown to $5.5 billion.”
"His fund was established at the end of 2024 with an initial size of $255 million. In just six months, his fund outperformed the S&P 500 by more than eight times."
"In a 165-page paper titled 'Situational Awareness,' he essentially predicted that we will reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by 2027."
A shift in investment paradigms: from chips to infrastructure
"He sold off Nvidia, Broadcom, TSMC, and Micron. These are all major AI infrastructure companies."
"By the end of 2025 or the beginning of 2026, he believes the market will have largely fully reflected the value of GPUs."
"He shifted his focus to key bottlenecks that investors have not yet fully paid attention to—energy and infrastructure."
“ The existing power grid was designed for humans, not to meet the enormous AI demands we face today. That’s where his current investments are focused.”
Core holding: Bloom Energy
“Bloom Energy is his largest investment to date, accounting for 20% of his entire portfolio… He has built a huge position in the company, amounting to $855 million.”
“Bloom Energy has developed a device called an oxide fuel cell… that can directly convert natural gas into electricity usable in data centers. It is modular and can be deployed quickly.”
"Their backlog of orders is as high as $20 billion. Revenue grew by about 34% in 2025, and they expect revenue to grow by another 40% in 2026."
“If you use a product like a natural gas turbine from Bloom Energy, you don’t need to rely on the power grid at all. You just need to install it next to your AI data center.”
Infrastructure and "Shortcuts" to Bitcoin Mining
“Leopold has invested heavily in CoreWeave. He has made the largest leveraged investments in core GPU infrastructure and energy supply.”
“He invested in many Bitcoin mining companies… because these companies possess two key elements needed to build AI infrastructure: land and electricity.”
“ He acquired these companies to obtain their licenses and grid access rights. Typically, obtaining these licenses takes months or even years.”
“It’s a bit like taking over a bar that already has a liquor sales license, instead of applying for a new license yourself and waiting for years. It’s a very smart ‘shortcut’.”
Short selling logic and the end of IT outsourcing
"He held a short position in a particular company, Infosys... Their business model relies entirely on providing cheaper labor than in Western countries."
"He realized that these models were now powerful enough to not only automate simple tasks but also handle some very important IT processes, so he shorted the company on a large scale."
Investment Philosophy: A Return to the Physical World
- " Companies that rely solely on software will face significant challenges in the future. This shift is not just about building architecture, but about investing in the physical world, such as manufacturing, factories, energy, and infrastructure."
- “These are areas that cannot be built with AI; they require human resources, licenses, and legislation to achieve.”
- "Energy is the only resource that no one can have enough of... It all revolves around one core: powering the future."
Young investment prodigy Leopold Ashbrer
Josh Kale:
There's a man named Leopold Ashbrer who's 24 years old. We featured him on a show last year when he was 23 and managing $1 billion, focusing on investing in emerging, cutting-edge AI concepts and technologies. Today, just one year later, that $1 billion has grown to $5.5 billion.
This guy, much younger than both of us, has just achieved a groundbreaking feat, earning him more money in the AI field than any other fund in the world. More importantly, AI is currently the hottest market, meaning the competition is fierce. So it's clear that this guy named Leopold is doing something different.
Just last week, his new 13F report was released, finally giving us a glimpse into his recent trading activities. So we'll be examining these documents closely to see exactly what this guy did to make the funds he manage surge from $1 billion to $5.5 billion.
Insights from the 13F report
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
He accomplished all this in just 12 months. His fund was established at the end of 2024 with an initial size of $255 million. In just six months, it outperformed the S&P 500 by more than eight times, growing to $2 billion. Since we last discussed his third-quarter fund report on the show, it has grown by another $1.5 billion. So, he's currently experiencing a phenomenal period of explosive growth.
He's very young, and he's made a rather significant shift, but it all aligns with what he calls his "bible"—a 165-page paper titled "Situational Awareness." In it, he essentially predicts we'll reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by 2027. This grand paper details his vision of how the AI revolution will unfold. His predictions have been almost entirely accurate; he successfully foresaw the GPU infrastructure boom, and now he's proposing a very important shift, which we'll delve into next.
The Transformation from Chips to Infrastructure
Josh Kale:
I think the whole investment philosophy is shifting from chips to infrastructure. What we're seeing on the screen now is very interesting. He created a document using Claude that will guide us through the entire changeover record between last year and this year. Perhaps we could start with the assets he sold off, because the positions he sold were quite large, including Nvidia, where he sold $300 million worth of put options in one quarter.
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
You'll see that many of the stocks he sold were from very popular companies, companies that many people are currently investing in. So the question is, why did he sell $1 billion worth of stock in these companies? He sold Nvidia, Broadcom, TSMC, and Micron. These are all major AI infrastructure companies.
He actually made money selling Nvidia stock; he held $300 million worth of put options, meaning he likely profited from the decline in Nvidia's stock price over the past few months. So the question is, why did he do that?
In his 165-page paper, he mentioned that by the end of 2025 or early 2026, he believed the market would have largely fully reflected the value of GPUs. This value would primarily come from companies like Nvidia and Broadcom, which manufacture these chips and then stack them up for AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic to use for training models.
Now, he's shifting his focus to major bottlenecks that investors haven't fully addressed— energy and infrastructure . Currently, a major problem facing many AI labs is that they have too many GPUs; and existing power grids were designed for humans, not to meet the massive AI demands we face today. This is where his current investments are concentrated.
Sell Nvidia put options
Josh Kale:
I found it interesting to see him sell his put options on Nvidia and completely exit his investment in the company. When I chat with friends or ordinary people on Wall Street, Nvidia is always on everyone's lips; it's the biggest investment target. Seeing him walk away from Nvidia, I think, once again proves that he's always one step ahead, always able to foresee future trends, rather than dwelling on past hot topics. In his view, the future focus is on infrastructure , on shifting from chips to information technology.
This is perhaps where we can delve deeper into his new investments, as these are the stocks you should be watching. These are his current holdings, and the assets he believes will grow in the future. If his judgment is correct, we should be able to see considerable returns. So, what new investments did he make this quarter?
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
Here is a very neat portfolio chart that organizes all of Leopold Ashbrer's investments by AI technology stack. We can see that the investments are divided into categories such as power generation, real estate and facilities, computing and hosting, connectivity, storage and memory, and chips and silicon wafers .
Actually, I'd like to add something to what I just said. I noticed he made a very clever trade with Intel. He sold his shares but still held a huge long position. This freed up liquidity, allowing him to invest in other companies. The main company he invested heavily in was a power generation company called Bloom Energy . This company was virtually unknown about three months ago, but they specialize in manufacturing power turbines for AI data centers.
He established a massive position in this company, amounting to $855 million. While it's shown here as $876 million, the report states $855 million.
Bloom Energy: Electricity Innovator
Josh Kale:
Bloom Energy is currently his largest investment, accounting for 20% of his entire portfolio. This has absolutely nothing to do with the chip industry; it's a completely different area. I looked into their business and found it quite interesting.
Bloom Energy has developed a device called an oxide fuel cell, an advanced technology for generating electricity on-site from natural gas. Typically, when natural gas is delivered to data centers, it needs to be heated and cooled via turbines—a very cumbersome energy production process. Bloom Energy's "fuel box," however, can directly convert natural gas into electricity usable by the data center. It's modular, allows for rapid deployment, and appears to have no supply shortage issues. To my knowledge, they plan to produce 2 gigawatts of electricity this year.
This is a very interesting approach to energy. I've been looking for the "Nvidia of the energy sector" —that is, the "chipmaker" of the energy sector . I haven't found a perfect counterpart yet, but perhaps Bloom Energy could become that company.
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
I also reviewed their recent financial statements, as they are a publicly traded company. Their backlog of orders is a staggering $20 billion. Revenue grew by approximately 34% in 2025, and they project another 40% growth in 2026, clearly indicating that demand far exceeds supply.
You mentioned oxide fuel cells. Their natural gas turbines are particularly attractive because they don't rely on the existing power grid. As I mentioned before, the current power grid is under significant pressure because humans need energy, and AI data centers also need energy, leading to rising energy prices in the areas where AI data centers are located. If you use a product like Bloom Energy's natural gas turbine, you don't need to rely on the grid at all. You simply install it next to your AI data center to obtain electricity at a high cost and efficiency for training or inference on your GPUs and data center.
Companies like Broadcom and CoreWeave will need this energy, especially hyperscale cloud service providers and AI labs. This reminds me of the game Civilization, I don't know if you've played it, but this situation is like you moving infrastructure and energy production facilities to your own small settlement to drive its development , and what's happening here is very similar to that scenario.
Josh Kale:
It's obvious that there's no energy shortage; the question is who can produce the most energy . They do have a very large backlog of orders, but the question is whether they can produce enough to fulfill those orders. Manufacturing capacity becomes a key issue here. In many of these investments, we are entering a world of "atoms," where manufacturing truly becomes important. I'd love to delve deeper into this in the future to see if they truly have the capacity for large-scale production. But for now, it's undoubtedly a very important investment area, accounting for 20% of his portfolio. So, what other noteworthy positions are there in his new portfolio?
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
He also added approximately $300 million to his investment in CoreWeave . Imagine you're an AI lab; you need GPUs. But buying GPUs from a company like Nvidia is only part of the job. Deploying those GPUs in rack servers, providing power, offering technical engineering support, and maintaining the GPU servers and cooling systems are entirely different matters. So you can outsource these tasks to a company known as a "new type of cloud service provider," like CoreWeave, which specializes in handling these things.
Broadcom offers similar services to some extent, but CoreWeave is a smaller company that initially focused on services for the GPU gaming era and has now transformed into a company specializing in AI. Leopold has invested heavily in CoreWeave. In the third quarter, which we discussed earlier, he had already invested $500 million, and this time he added another $300 million. His total investment in CoreWeave may now reach $800 million, but there's more to the story. He also holds approximately 10% of Core Scientific, one of CoreWeave's main suppliers, a company that specializes in providing energy grid construction services for CoreWeave.
If you consider betting strategies in investing, Leopold has likely made the largest leveraged investments in core GPU infrastructure (such as CoreWeave’s new cloud services) and energy supply (such as Bloom Energy) , which are his two main positions in his current fund.
Bitcoin mining
Josh Kale:
What I find interesting is that he has begun to hold enough shares in these companies to become an activist investor who can actually influence their decision-making. I find this very intriguing. In studying his portfolio, aside from electricity production being the obvious direction, I noticed that his largest new positions were actually in real estate-related investments; he added about 10 real estate-related positions, which are related to Bitcoin mining.
What we're seeing now is that he's invested in numerous Bitcoin mining companies . This seems a bit strange and illogical. After all, the cryptocurrency market isn't doing well, and Bitcoin isn't performing well either. Why would he buy into these Bitcoin mining companies? The reason is that these companies possess two key elements needed to build AI infrastructure: land and electricity .
What does Bitcoin mining require? A significant amount of energy and sufficient space to house GPU racks. While Bitcoin mining hasn't completely declined, these companies' real estate and power resources clearly offer a better risk-reward ratio. It seems he's betting that these Bitcoin mining companies will either sell their land use rights and licenses or transform directly into AI data centers.
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
To be clear, his interest in these companies wasn't for cryptocurrency mining; he acquired them to gain access to their licenses and grid connections. Typically, obtaining these licenses takes months or even years. This is why we see companies like Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI announcing $1.4 trillion in computing partnerships, but these partnerships haven't fully translated into the models they launch. This is one reason why GPU supply always lags behind the latest generation—because they can't obtain these licenses in time.
Leopold instead acquired these small companies that already possessed licenses, bypassing the entire licensing process. He completely stripped these companies of their encryption services, repurposed them specifically for training AI models, and became the infrastructure provider for these AI labs. It's a bit like taking over a bar that already had a liquor sales license, rather than applying for a new license and waiting years—a very clever "shortcut."
AGI and Market Trends
Josh Kale:
One of the things I admire most about his investment philosophy, and how I've seen it validated over the past year, is its simplicity and efficiency . For example, Bitcoin mining companies obviously possess the licenses and energy, and obviously every AI company needs these resources. So why isn't everyone buying into these companies? I believe it's precisely because these ideas are so simplistic that many people are excluded from investing. But time and again, his simple ideas have proven correct.
Will Leopold's prediction of achieving AGI by 2027 also come true? Will we really achieve AGI in 2027?
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
To test this prediction, we launched a prediction market on Polymarket to predict whether OpenAI will announce the achievement of AGI by 2027. Currently, many people were skeptical of Leopold's predictions when he launched the fund, but the probability in this prediction market is now 13%. So, it seems a bit far-fetched. His investment philosophy may be correct, but the timeline might be slightly inaccurate.
The probability is indeed very small. However, I must say that he initially faced criticism for this paper, with many considering his views too outlandish and unrealistic. Approximately 50% of respondents believe AGI will be achieved within the next few months, while others predict it won't happen until 2030. Leopold is the only one to have made this prediction of 2027, and so far, it appears to be the closest to accuracy.
He predicted the importance of GPUs before the GPU boom even began. Now, he's making predictions before the energy infrastructure boom. So I think he's still ahead of the curve in this respect.
However, his portfolio not only contained long positions, but he also held a short position in a specific company: Infosys, an IT outsourcing company primarily operating in India. Their business model relies entirely on providing cheaper labor than in Western countries like the US or Europe. Simply put, it's about "outsourcing all your administrative IT work to us, and we'll take care of it for you."
I believe his bet here is based on the trends he observed. He saw the rise of products like Claude Code and GPT Codex 5.3 and realized that these models were now powerful enough to not only automate simple tasks but also handle some very important IT processes, so he shorted the company on a large scale.
I believe this is one of his more insightful investments, and it aligns better with the trends we're seeing now, showing that he's willing to put his views into practice with real money.
Bull Market and Bear Market
Josh Kale:
Let's discuss the reasons for bull markets and bear markets. When you enter such a portfolio, what are some points of criticism or things to be cautious about? The first thing that comes to mind is that this investor is only 24 years old. I'm not sure if he has as much experience as many other investors do. This might be an advantage to some extent, but will that advantage collapse at some point?
Another concern for me is that this fund's investment philosophy is somewhat like a single-theme bet. If the growth rate of AI infrastructure and related spending slows, or if the macroeconomic environment changes, every position in this portfolio could be affected by downward pressure. There's very little room for hedging. So this strategy does have some potential flaws, but for now, all the signals indicate that the fund's performance will only continue to improve.
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
If you look at some of the most prominent investors of our time, their success has never been about how much money they made in a single year or quarter, but about their ability to achieve stable returns and compound growth year after year, decade after decade. Leopold's start has been phenomenal; his performance far surpasses the average hedge fund across any industry, not just in the AI sector. However, he still needs to prove himself over a longer time horizon, and time will tell.
All I want to say is that this man, who was once fired by OpenAI, has profound insights into the future development of AI and has made some of the boldest predictions. He is the only person whose predictions have been almost all accurate so far. He poured a lot of effort into his 165-page paper, was full of confidence in his views, and so far, it seems that all of this is paying off.
Will things change in the future? Possibly. But you can think of these reports and investments as his real-time tracking tool for identifying bottlenecks in the AI race, and I want to emphasize that. Initially, his fund's investment philosophy focused on GPUs. He believed GPUs would become a hot spot in demand, and the market was underestimating the opportunity. Now, his view is that this opportunity has been fully priced in by the market, and the next bottleneck he sees is shifting towards energy infrastructure .
Look at Elon Musk, he's launching data centers into space. Why? Because the sun provides more energy. And companies like Google, Meta, Broadcom, and Nvidia are investing in data centers or data center infrastructure to gain access to the power grid. He's simply directing his money where the demand is, which I think is a smart move.
Josh Kale:
I recently read a great article by Naval, whose core idea is that companies that rely solely on software will face significant challenges in the future because developing and generating custom software has become incredibly easy. I believe his shift isn't just about building architecture, but about investing in the physical world — manufacturing, factories, energy, and infrastructure . These are areas that AI cannot build; they require human capital, licenses, and legislation—hardware and infrastructure that I believe are the future direction.
Energy is the only resource that no one can have a sufficient supply of. Whether it's electricity production or real estate investment, it all revolves around one core: powering the future . In the last earnings season alone, just a few companies like Google, Amazon, and Nvidia pledged $650 billion in capital expenditures, demonstrating the massive amount of money that will be poured into addressing this issue, and his portfolio is clearly poised to capture all the upside potential.
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
Yes, he did make some investments that you might consider high-risk. For example, unless you're very familiar with the energy infrastructure sector, many people probably haven't even heard of Bloom Energy. But this company can be considered a Tier 1, or even a top-tier, energy company, especially in portable energy. He pieced together these clues, concluding that the power grid couldn't support current demand, and decided to invest in this company. He put his money in with extremely high conviction. We're talking about him putting almost a fifth of his entire portfolio into this one investment.
This is an extremely concentrated, high-risk, high-conviction investment approach. But if successful, this is why his portfolio achieved a 4.5 to 5-fold return in just a year and a half. We must pay him homage; growing $1 billion to $5.5 billion in a year is simply incredible.
The Future of Leopold Investment
Josh Kale:
Overall, his achievements are truly remarkable, and his latest transformation from hardware to infrastructure to energy looks directional and very promising. If you agree with his portfolio, this might be an opportunity worth watching. Of course, this is not investment advice; it's just this person's portfolio, but it certainly looks very promising and could perform exceptionally well this year.
Josh Kale:
I'm also very curious about what our audience thinks. I want to know if you think our investment analysis is professional-level, on par with Leopold's, or if you think we're completely wrong and have overlooked some obvious stories.
Ejaaz Ahamadeen:
Do you know what I want? I want to know what you think is the best stock of the year.
Josh Kale:
Yes, Leopold has bet on Bloom Energy. I'd like to know, what is your Bloom Energy? What do we need to know to achieve another 5x growth this year?
