I just noticed an impressive development in the AI investment scene. Leopold Aschenbrenner, a name increasingly mentioned in the industry, has achieved quite a spectacular performance with his fund Situational Awareness LP. The assets have grown from $225 million to $5.5 billion within a year — that's quite remarkable.

What Leopold is doing is strategically interesting. He focuses on the infrastructure side of the AI supply chain, not on surface trends. Specifically: energy, computing power, optical communication. The fund invests selectively in these upstream areas because that's where the real scarcity lies.

A detail that particularly fascinates me: the portfolio includes Bitcoin mining companies that are transforming into AI data centers. This is no random decision by Leopold. It shows how smart investors are leveraging existing resources in a weak crypto market for the next wave. The mining infrastructure is simply perfect for the requirements of AI data centers.

Aschenbrenner founded the fund only in September 2024 but comes from the FTX Future Fund. The speed at which Leopold is raising and deploying capital here indicates that the market takes this focus on AI infrastructure very seriously. This is less a trend and more a reassessment of genuine bottlenecks in the system.