Leopold is Back: 13F Filings Reveal a New Bet

**Ejaaz** (0:00)
The most famous AI bull on Wall Street just called the top on the entire AI market. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old ex-open-air researcher who got fired, started a fund and turned $250 million into $14 billion in less than two years is back. And his latest investment portfolio is not what you would expect. He's gone completely bearish the entire stock market. He has taken out an $8 billion short across the biggest names in AI. We're talking about Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, the entire semiconductor supply chain. But all is not lost. He also revealed where the next biggest AI investment is going to be. It's in power and memory. He's doubled down on his investments in data centers, as well as three brand new companies. We're going to get into all of this. But first, let's talk about the biggest changes.

**Josh** (0:44)
Ejaaz, the largest company in the world, Nvidia, the poster child for the AI revolution. The stock that has made so many investors so wealthy over this run is now in the crosshairs. This is the largest short position that Leopold has. It's not obviously apparent when you're looking at the filing. Because when you look at the portfolio of what he's most short, we see VanEck Semiconductor ETF is number one. And just beneath that is Nvidia. Now currently, he has $1.5 billion of short exposure to Nvidia. And this comes through the form of a put. And those who are not familiar with it, a put basically just gives Leopold the option but not the obligation to sell the underlying asset at a predetermined price. So he basically buys the right to sell Nvidia stock at a higher price should it go lower. Now there is a $2 billion position sitting just above this, which is a stock that most people may not have heard before. The ticker is SMH and it goes by the name of VanX Semiconductor ETF. Within this ETF, I was looking through the holdings and the largest holding is actually Nvidia at 20%, which means if you combine the top two shorts, you get a $1.9 billion short position on Nvidia. And this is probably disappointing to a lot because everyone seems to believe that Nvidia is on a one-way trajectory north, but Leopold seems to think otherwise. In addition to this position, we have Broadcom, Oracle, AMD, Micron, ASML, Intel, Corning.
These are all short positions now. And what you'll know is that, I mean, Intel, one of the ones that he made his bread and butter on, Intel made him more money than any stock in, I think, the portfolio's history. He is now short on Intel and these are all new positions. He's short on Broadcom. For those not familiar, Broadcom is the company that is responsible mostly for building out OpenAI's Project Stargate. That means he's essentially pulling out a short position on OpenAI and Project Stargate. There's some concerning names here, if you've been bullish on the AI market for a while, even something like Corning, the optical glass company. This has been a big beta play after the semiconductor trade, and he's pulled up a big short position on this. There's a lot of shorts that are coming on the market. There's, like you said, $8 billion of short exposure. That's 40 times more than the fund was worth just 18 months ago. This is a huge position he's taking.

**Ejaaz** (2:51)
Yeah, it's extremely aggressive and it becomes more apparent when you realize that his entire fund thesis was based on a 64-page essay that he wrote called Situational Awareness. The core thesis, if you remember, Josh, is a big bet on semiconductors, specifically that compute flops will increase on multiple orders of magnitude over the next decade. This explicit swing trade that he's made, this $8 billion short position, is effectively a bet against that now. So it either indicates one of two things.
One, he thinks that the market is too crowded for this particular trade, and so he's expecting there to be short-term volatility in downwards pressure on price, or he just believes something's broken in his thesis and he hasn't spoken about what that might be.
Now, not all is lost. If you look on the right side of this chart that we're showing, there is a bull book as well. So he does hold still massive positions in stock equity positions for specific types of companies, as well as taking on core options as well. So let's look at what he's positive on. So CoreWeave, he's maintained his position and CoreWeave has been one of his biggest data center or Neo Cloud investments for the longest time since the start of the fund actually. He's taken levied bets on CoreWeave in many different ways through his own private investment or acquisition of Core Scientific, which helps CoreWeave do its thing. So for those of you who aren't familiar, CoreWeave is basically a Neo Cloud that creates and sets up GPUs and provides them to the biggest AI labs. They've signed multi-billion dollar deals with the likes of Meta, Anthropic, and the likes of that. Then if you look just below that, Bloom Energy.