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.

“Aschenbrenner’s bet is logical,” said Sharma.

Securing power

AI has one big problem: not enough electricity.

Training OpenAI’s GPT-4, one of the more popular large language modesl on the market, reportedly consumes over 12 megawatts — the equivalent of around 12,000 homes.

Future models will likely need even more.

Securing that power is extraordinarily difficult. In the US, connecting a new data centre to the grid typically takes three to five years due in part to environmental reviews, interconnection studies, transmission upgrades, and local permits.

Those timelines stretch out into the horizon. Cue Bitcoin.

“Because traditional data centre lead times are so long, the existing, power-ready assets held by miners are incredibly valuable for an industry struggling to keep up with demand,” Sharma said.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].