Why this fired OpenAI employee is betting $1bn on Bitcoin miners
Bitcoin miners just got a billion-dollar vote of confidence from an unlikely source: a former OpenAI researcher.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 24-year-old researcher who was fired by OpenAI in 2024 over an alleged information leak, placed a number of bets on the Bitcoin mining sector through his billion-dollar hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP.
Situational Awareness LP is now worth $5.5 billion, with approximately $1 billion invested in Bitcoin miners, according to the fund’s latest SEC filing.
Aschenbrenner’s billion-dollar bet is one of the largest institutional investments in Bitcoin miners in months. But analysts say it’s a signal that the sector’s real asset was never Bitcoin — but electricity.
“A miner’s true value has always resided in its energy infrastructure and grid access,” Nishant Sharma, founder of mining and computing consulting firm Blocksbridge, told DL News. “In the current market, the underlying energy infrastructure often carries a higher valuation than the Bitcoin it could potentially produce.”
As AI companies scramble for power capacity and big-name mining stocks trade at multi-year lows, Aschenbrenner, who once served as a member of FTX’s Future Fund philanthropy team, sees serious value in Bitcoin companies sitting on gigawatts of industrial power.
And Aschenbrenner’s timing couldn’t be more prescient.
Bitcoin miner revenues have been getting crushed after the 2024 halving cut block rewards in half. Scant onchain activity has further exacerbated their situation, as it’s led to dwindling transaction-fee revenue.
Miners have thus pivoted to AI — riding the coattails of a hyped up trade — selling Bitcoin and abandoning the business model they were built on.
Shareholders for Bitcoin miners are now demanding that they pivot to AI even faster.
Aschenbrenner didn’t return requests for comment.
Aschenbrenner’s portfolio shows major positions across the Bitcoin mining sector.
These include Core Scientific, Iris Energy, Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, and Hut 8, totalling around $1 billion in Bitcoin miners that are now pivoting heavily into AI.
Basically, he’s targeting Bitcoin miners that have made explicit moves towards the AI sector.
Core Scientific contracted AI cloud provider CoreWeave for 12 years, which is expected to generate $10 billion in revenue. IREN is targeting over $500 million in annualised revenue from AI cloud services by early 2026, and Riot recently shifted gears toward AI and high-performance computing, signing a 10-year data centre lease with AMD.
Indeed, the pivot is driven by economic factors that are hard to overlook. If the trend continues, AI hosting will generate predictable revenue, while Bitcoin mining depends on volatile crypto prices and brutal competition.
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