The Man Who Called The AI Boom Is Buying These 2 “Hidden” Stocks

Summary

A twenty-four-year-old investor who turned two hundred forty million dollars into five point five billion dollars is now making a massive eight point five billion dollar bet against the artificial intelligence chip trade. Leopold Ashen Brener, a German-born prodigy who graduated from Columbia at nineteen and worked at OpenAI, launched an investment fund two years ago with a quarter of a billion dollars from prominent tech investors. By the end of last year, his fund's US stock holdings had grown to five point five billion dollars, and today, the portfolio is worth over thirteen billion dollars, outperforming the S&P five hundred by nearly one hundred percentage points in a single year. Instead of chasing popular AI names, Brener focused on infrastructure, investing in companies like Bloom Energy for fuel cells powering data centers, SanDisk for memory and storage, and Lummen for optical gear. His recent first quarter filing reveals he's doubling down on AI infrastructure, with Bloom Energy remaining a top ten holding and SanDisk still in the portfolio, alongside a position in Coreweave, an AI cloud company. He's also significantly increased his holdings in Bitcoin miners CleanSpark and Riot Platforms, by over six hundred percent and eighty-seven percent respectively, believing their assets of power, land, and data center shells are valuable for AI computing. He views this as a bet on electricity, as AI requires enormous power consumption, with projected needs to reach the equivalent of over fifteen percent of US electricity production by twenty thirty. However, in a striking move, Brener has also placed substantial bets against the semiconductor industry, filing for eight point five billion dollars in put options against major chip and semiconductor companies like Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom, AMD, and Micron, effectively betting that their stock prices will fall. While the notional value is eight point five billion dollars, the actual cost of these put options is estimated to be a couple hundred million dollars. He has also completely exited positions in Intel, Lummenum, EQT, and Tower Semiconductor. This strategic positioning suggests he either believes the chip stocks have run too high and is hedging his gains, or he is signaling a potential peak in the market for these companies.