Why Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI hedge fund is betting big on power companies and bitcoin miners to fuel the ‘superintelligence’ race

When Fortune profiled Leopold Aschenbrenner in October 2025, the former OpenAI researcher—famously fired after roughly a year at the company—and onetime member of FTX’s Future Fund philanthropy team was best known for a self-published 165-page monograph titled Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. That essay, published in 2024, argued that governments and investors needed to recognize how quickly AGI, or artificial general intelligence, could arrive—and what was at stake if the U.S. fell behind.