AI Hedge Fund Hits $20B on Anthropic Bet as Bybit Tokenizes SpaceX IPO

Crypto News

A 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher has built one of Wall Street's most talked-about trades, with his AI-focused hedge fund, Situational Awareness, now managing roughly $20 billion. The fund returned about 270% after fees through May, nearly quadrupling capital invested in January. Founder Leopold Aschenbrenner's thesis is deceptively simple: rather than wagering on which artificial-intelligence model wins, he is betting on the physical infrastructure powering the boom—electricity and compute. That framing has drawn capital from secretive trading firm Jane Street, an unusual outside backer. Crucially for digital-asset markets, his strategy leans on former Bitcoin mining operations that now host AI workloads instead of producing coins.

The fund's single largest position is not a public stock but a private slice of Anthropic, the developer behind the Claude chatbot. Aschenbrenner bought in during February 2025, when the company carried a roughly $60 billion valuation; by May 2026 a fresh funding round had lifted that figure to about $965 billion, turning the holding into nearly a fifth of the entire portfolio. His firm now appears among Anthropic's listed investors, and the AI maker has reportedly moved toward a confidential IPO filing. Other major holdings include Bloom Energy, which builds on-site fuel cells, and CoreWeave, a provider that rents out AI computing capacity to model developers across the industry.

The clever twist sits on the other side of the ledger. While going long on power generation, the manager has staked more than $1.5 billion against Nvidia and over $2 billion shorting a broader basket of chip stocks. His reasoning is that semiconductor valuations already assume flawless execution, whereas the genuine bottleneck will be electricity, not silicon. The same logic underpins his enthusiasm for repurposed mining data centers, where operators with cheap power and cooling can pivot toward hosting AI compute. That convergence has pushed several Bitcoin miners to recast themselves as energy-rich AI landlords, blurring the line between crypto infrastructure and the artificial-intelligence supply chain.

In a parallel push to bring public-market offerings onto blockchain rails, Bybit confirmed it will let eligible users subscribe to tokenized shares in US initial public offerings at the offering price, starting with SpaceX. The exchange is using the xStocks framework, which aggregates investor demand across partner platforms and works with underwriting syndicates to secure allocations before tokenizing the shares. Users can register interest and submit subscription requests, with allocations distributed pro-rata and unused funds refunded if demand outstrips supply. Tokenized SpaceX shares are scheduled to begin trading on Bybit's spot market on June 12, each backed 1:1 by underlying equity held in regulated broker-dealer custody.

The move places Bybit alongside a widening field of platforms racing to tokenize equity exposure. Kraken's parent recently named SpaceX as the inaugural offering for its xStocks IPO Access product, available in more than 110 markets but excluding the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom over regulatory restrictions. A day earlier, Coinbase opened a SpaceX pre-IPO market giving non-US users exposure to the company's private valuation through perpetual futures. xStocks now ranks as the second-largest tokenized-stock venue, holding roughly $415 million in tokenized equities and about 28% of that market—evidence that DeFi rails are steadily absorbing traditional financial instruments.

SpaceX itself is positioning for a potentially record-breaking debut. Founded by Elon Musk in 2002 and known for its Falcon rockets, Dragon spacecraft and Starlink satellite network, the company filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in April. The filing followed its acquisition of Musk's artificial-intelligence startup xAI two months earlier, deepening the aerospace group's footprint in the AI sector. Demand has reportedly exceeded available shares ahead of the planned June 12 listing, with the company targeting a valuation of at least $75 billion. For crypto exchanges, securing tokenized access to such a marquee name is as much a branding milestone as a product launch.

Taken together, these developments sketch the dominant narrative of this cycle: the fusion of crypto infrastructure with the artificial-intelligence and real-world-asset booms. Capital is rotating away from pure token speculation toward the picks-and-shovels layer—power, compute and tokenized equity—where settlement is faster and access is global. Bitcoin miners reinventing themselves as AI hosts, hedge funds shorting chips to bet on electricity, and platforms wrapping IPO shares as tokens tradable on crypto exchanges all point to the same arc. As regulators draw boundaries around who can participate, the contest increasingly centers on owning the infrastructure beneath the hype rather than the hype itself.