On May 18, 2026, Situational Awareness LP filed its Q1 2026 Form 13F. The fund’s nominal exposure to U.S. equities and options expanded from $5.52 billion at the end of 2025 to $13.677 billion — a 148% increase in a single quarter. Yet what captured market attention was not the scale, but the structure: over 60% of the newly added nominal exposure was concentrated entirely in put options on semiconductor stocks.
Q1 Put Positions Covered Nine Underlyings: VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), NVIDIA, Broadcom, Oracle, AMD, Micron, TSMC, ASML, and Intel. SMH had the largest nominal put exposure at $2.04 billion; NVIDIA followed closely with $1.56 billion. Micron and TSMC were held with both call and put options — a two-way bet on volatility, not a unilateral short. Note that Form 13F discloses only the nominal value of options, not net short exposure. These put positions could represent active bearish bets — or they could be protective hedges purchased while holding long equity positions. Based solely on the 13F filing, the full intent cannot be reconstructed.
On the underlying equity side, the fund continued to ramp up exposure to AI compute infrastructure. Its CoreWeave stake rose from 6.1 million shares to 7.18 million; IREN and Applied Digital were also increased in tandem. The most aggressive expansion occurred among mining companies: Bitfarms (now renamed Keel Infrastructure) surged from 6.9 million to 19.88 million shares; CleanSpark jumped from 1.64 million to 12.28 million; Riot Platforms climbed from 6.17 million to 11.5 million. Bloom Energy reduced its position by 3.59 million shares but still holds ~$879 million in market value — and retains 408,500 call options. This is profit-taking, not a strategic pivot.
Exit moves were concentrated in the optical communications sector. Lumentum and Coherent were fully liquidated. Last quarter, Lumentum alone accounted for 8.68% of the fund’s portfolio — this quarter, it vanished entirely. Intel’s activity warrants special attention: last quarter the fund held ~20 million call options on Intel; this quarter, all calls were fully exited — and new put positions were established. This wasn’t a flat position — it was a complete directional reversal: from bullish to bearish.
Where bottlenecks exist, capital flows. The logic behind this 13F reflects a concrete supply-demand assessment: the binding constraint on AI expansion is shifting. For the past two years, GPU shortages have been the core bottleneck limiting AI scale — prompting persistent trading in NVIDIA, HBM memory, advanced process nodes, and optical interconnects. During this phase, the entire semiconductor sector enjoyed substantial valuation premiums. But as AI compute clusters scale toward 100,000 GPUs — even 1 million — new constraints are emerging. In the U.S., grid interconnection applications are backlogged by over 2 TW, with average wait times exceeding five years; transformer manufacturing capacity is limited; and data center construction timelines stretch into multiple years. While chip fabs can keep scaling, the electricity, land, and construction capacity needed to power and house those chips cannot keep pace.
Under this thesis, shorting the semiconductor sector isn’t predicated on AI failing — rather, it reflects the view that chip valuations have already priced in future growth, and value is migrating downstream to physical infrastructure. Buying puts on SMH and NVIDIA hedges against potential valuation corrections in the chip segment; continuing to hold CoreWeave, mining-company-turned-infrastructure plays, and Bloom Energy expresses conviction in the real-world bottlenecks: power supply and data center capacity. CoreWeave’s own positioning reinforces this logic: its call option holdings were slashed from 10.81 million to just 1.81 million, while its common stock position grew from 6.1 million to 7.18 million shares. The directional view remains unchanged — but high-leverage options were replaced with equity, reducing portfolio volatility.
From $225 million to $13.677 billion. Founded in September 2024, the fund disclosed its first 13F with ~$225 million in U.S. equity exposure. By end-2025, that figure had grown to $5.52 billion; as of March 31, 2026, nominal exposure reached $13.677 billion. In H1 2025, the fund delivered ~47% returns — versus ~6% for the S&P 500 — outperforming the index by ~12.5 percentage points for the full year. Prior to launching the fund, this 24-year-old German published a 165-page manifesto titled Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, outlining his thesis that AGI timelines, electricity, and computing infrastructure would become the dominant bottlenecks. Early capital came from Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison.
The significance of this quarterly report lies in its translation of a previously narrative-driven thesis into an explicit, actionable portfolio structure. Chips are merely the entry point; what truly governs the pace of AI expansion is whether real-world electricity grids can be connected, data centers built, and interconnection approvals secured within five years. If this thesis holds, the defining keywords of AI investment over the past two years were GPUs and models. In the years ahead, they may well be power, land, and construction time.
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Semiconductor Peak Play: The AI God’s $7.7B Bet and Its Crypto Implications
The recent 13F filing by Situational Awareness LP reveals a seismic shift in the AI investment landscape that should command the attention of every sophisticated crypto investor. This fund, helmed by a 24-year-old German prodigy who delivered 47% returns in H1 2025 while the broader market gained just 6%, has effectively placed a $7.7 billion bet that the semiconductor sector has peaked and that value is migrating toward physical infrastructure. For crypto investors, particularly those exposed to mining operations and energy infrastructure, this represents a paradigm-shifting realignment of bottlenecks in the digital economy.
The Great Semiconductor Rotation
What Situational Awareness has executed is nothing short of a strategic masterclass. The fund’s expansion from $5.52 billion to $13.677 billion in a single quarter, with over 60% of new capital allocated to put options on semiconductor stocks, signals a profound conviction that the semiconductor sector’s premium valuations have fully priced in future growth. NVIDIA, with $1.56 billion in put options, sits at the epicenter of this bet.
This rotation from silicon to steel is particularly significant for crypto investors because it suggests that the narrative around AI investment is fundamentally shifting. For the past two years, the focus has been on GPU shortages and chip scarcity. The next phase, according to this thesis, will be dominated by power constraints, data center capacity, and grid interconnection bottlenecks. This creates a direct parallel with the crypto mining sector, which has long grappled with precisely these same challenges.
Mining Companies as the New Infrastructure darlings
The most compelling aspect of Situational Awareness’s portfolio is its aggressive accumulation of mining companies repositioned as infrastructure providers. Bitfarms (now Keel Infrastructure) saw its position surge from 6.9 million to 19.88 million shares, while CleanSpark and Riot Platforms similarly experienced exponential growth in stake ownership.
For crypto investors, this represents three critical insights:
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Mining-to-Infrastructure Transition: These funds are betting that crypto miners with existing power infrastructure and operational expertise will pivot to serve AI compute demands. The same skills required to manage thousands of mining rigs—power optimization, facility management, hardware logistics—are directly transferable to AI infrastructure operations.
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Power Premium: The explicit recognition of power grid constraints as a primary bottleneck elevates the value proposition of miners with long-term power contracts and stranded energy assets. As Situational Awareness notes, U.S. grid interconnection applications face a 2 TW backlog with five-year wait times—precisely the environment where crypto miners with existing grid connections hold disproportionate advantage.
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Infrastructure Tokenization: This thesis accelerates the narrative around “digital infrastructure” as an asset class. We should expect increased interest in tokenized representations of physical infrastructure, particularly those with embedded energy generation and distribution capabilities.
The Power Grid as Shared Constraint
Perhaps the most significant implication for crypto markets is the explicit recognition that power grids represent the binding constraint for both AI and blockchain expansion. The fund’s thesis that “while chip fabs can keep scaling, the electricity, land, and construction capacity needed to power and house those chips cannot keep pace” creates a powerful convergence opportunity.
This reality has several implications for crypto:
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Stranded Energy Assets: Crypto miners operating in regions with excess renewable generation but limited transmission capacity become strategically valuable as AI expands. Their stranded energy assets become premium infrastructure in an energy-constrained world.
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Microgrid Solutions: The need for localized power solutions will drive innovation in microgrid technologies, creating opportunities for blockchain-based energy trading and grid management protocols.
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Energy Token Economics: The convergence of AI and energy constraints could accelerate the development of energy-backed tokens, where value is derived from both physical energy generation and computational output.
Contrarian Risks and Opportunities
While Situational Awareness’s thesis is compelling, crypto investors should consider several counterarguments and risks:
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NVIDIA’s Vertical Integration: The semiconductor giant is aggressively expanding beyond chips into systems, software, and services. Their CUDA ecosystem and full-stack AI integration could create moats that the market underestimates.
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Mining Company Transition Risks: Not all miners will successfully pivot to AI infrastructure. Execution risk, technical expertise gaps, and capital intensity remain significant hurdles.
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Regulatory Arbitrage: AI infrastructure development may face different regulatory frameworks than crypto mining, potentially creating friction points for hybrid operations.
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Tokenization Liquidity: The market for tokenized infrastructure remains nascent with limited liquidity, potentially creating valuation disconnects between physical assets and their digital representations.
Strategic Implications for Crypto Investors
For sophisticated crypto investors, this thesis suggests several strategic realignments:
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Miner Selection Focus: Prioritize miners with demonstrated power infrastructure capabilities, multiple power sources, and flexible operational profiles that can serve both crypto and AI workloads.
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Energy Infrastructure Tokens: Identify projects combining renewable energy generation with blockchain-based energy management systems, particularly those with hybrid operational models.
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Data Center Real Estate: Consider exposure to tokenized data center real estate projects with embedded energy solutions and proximity to both crypto and AI demand centers.
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Infrastructure DeFi Protocols: Focus on DeFi protocols designed to facilitate capital formation for physical infrastructure projects, particularly those addressing energy and data center bottlenecks.
The Situational Awareness 13F filing represents more than just a sophisticated trading strategy—it’s a blueprint for understanding where value will accrue in the next phase of digital infrastructure development. For crypto investors, the message is clear: the convergence of AI, blockchain, and energy infrastructure is no longer speculative—it’s actively being capitalized by the most sophisticated capital in the market. Those who recognize and position themselves for this shift stand to capture significant value as the digital economy’s bottleneck moves from silicon to steel.