24-year-old 'New King of Wall Street' Exposes Portfolio: Shorting Chips, Heavy Position in AI Infrastructure

The 24-year-old Wall Street rising star and AI investment industry's closely watched, Leopold Aschenbrenner, who manages Situational Awareness LP, has just disclosed the first quarter stock adjustment report (13F). The fund size has grown significantly from $5.52 billion in the previous quarter to $13.7 billion, while its initial management size was only $255 million less than two years ago.

Aschenbrenner has not withdrawn from the AI theme, but he has divided the AI industry chain into two ends: one end is the chip stocks with high valuation and trading heat, and the other end is more fundamental physical infrastructure such as electricity, land, data centers, and storage. His core judgment is that the bottleneck of AI expansion may shift from models and chips to constraints in real-world resources.

Significantly Establishing Chip Put Options

As of the end of the first quarter, the fund held chip-related put options with a notional value of up to $8.46 billion, covering semiconductor ETFs and several large chip stocks. Among them, the notional value of put options on VanEck Semiconductor ETF is about $2 billion, and about $1.6 billion for Nvidia. In addition, the fund has established put options on broadcom, Oracle, AMD, Micron Technology, ASML, Intel, Corning, and TSMC.

These bearish options have become the fund's top five purchases and positions in the first quarter, clearly sending a signal of caution about short-term chip stock pricing.

However, it is inaccurate to interpret this as a comprehensive bearish view on semiconductors. The fund slightly increased its holdings by 80,000 shares of SanDisk in the first quarter and established call options on SanDisk with a notional value of $380 million, showing that it still sees structural opportunities in the storage field and takes selective bets on the semiconductor industry.

Core Long Position: AI Infrastructure

In contrast to the caution on the chip side, the fund continues to increase its investment in AI physical infrastructure. Bloom Energy remains the largest individual stock holding, with 6.5 million shares (worth $879 million) and 409,000 call options (notional value of $55 million).

The fund also increased its holdings in CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Applied Digital, and IREN Limited, among other cryptocurrency mining and data center operators. These companies have ready-made land, electricity access, and grid permits. Against the backdrop of rapid expansion of AI data centers, such "plug and play" resources are increasingly scarce.

Overall, Aschenbrenner's portfolio presents a clear repricing logic——reducing the risks of chips that have been fully chased, and increasing the physical bottlenecks that support AI expansion, that is, electricity, data center capacity, computing infrastructure, and storage.