Ex-OpenAI's Leopold Aschenbrenner is betting $13.6B on crypto miners as the backbone of his AI fund!

Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher who gained wide attention for his long-form AI forecasting work "Situational Awareness," is positioning crypto miners as a core infrastructure play inside his $13.6 billion AI investment vehicle. The thesis: mining operations already own the power contracts, physical footprint, and high-density electrical infrastructure that AI data centres desperately need — making them a faster and cheaper on-ramp to GPU compute capacity than greenfield builds.

The move signals a meaningful convergence of two capital pools that have historically traded separately. Institutional AI money chasing compute at scale is now looking at the same assets that crypto-native investors have held for years — stranded power, cheap land, and purpose-built cooling. If Aschenbrenner's fund deploys at the scale suggested, it could reprice the entire listed mining…