The man who turned $225 million into $13.7 billion just took a 5.6% stake in Nebius (Save this).
Aschenbrenner is a 24 year old former OpenAI researcher who was fired in 2024, then published a 165-page essay called situational Awareness, the Decade Ahead laying out a decade-long AI thesis with more precision and depth than almost anyone in markets had attempted.
Then he built a fund that expressed that thesis directly, he started with roughly $225 million in disclosed equity holdings in late 2024.
By early 2026, the fund had grown to $13.7 billion in disclosed US equity exposure, a performance that, over a single year, outpaced Warren Buffett's long term compounded returns across decades.
His thesis is not complicated, but it is precise and he laid out a simple extrapolation, the largest AI training clusters have been growing at half an order of magnitude per year for a decade.
GPT-4 ran on a cluster of roughly 25,000 A100s, about $500 million worth of compute, drawing 10 megawatts of power.
Play that forward two years to 2024, a 100-megawatt cluster, 100,000 H100 equivalents, costing billions.
Forward two more years to right now, 2026: a gigawatt-scale cluster, a million H100 equivalents, costing tens of billions.
By 2028, 10 gigawatts, more power than most US states, hundreds of billions of dollars.
And by 2030, a trillion dollar cluster drawing 100 gigawatts over 20% of all US electricity production.
His conclusion is that the real bottleneck in the AI era is not algorithms but rather compute, power, and the infrastructure to run them at that scale.
Nebius is exactly that bet and the company reported Q1 2026 revenues of $399 million, up 684% year over year.
Cost of revenues as a percentage of total revenue improved from 49% to just 26%, showing that every dollar of additional revenue is flowing through at increasingly high margins as capacity reaches full utilization.
The company is guiding to $7 billion to $9 billion in annualized run-rate revenue for the full year 2026 up from $1.2 billion just 18 months ago.
The pipeline heading into 2026 is tracking toward $4 billion supported by contract durations that extended 50% in a single quarter as large enterprise customers commit to longer-term capacity agreements.
Nebius has signed a five-year, $17.4 billion AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft and the company has secured over 2 gigawatts of contracted power and is building nine new data centers including a 1.2 gigawatt AI factory in Pennsylvania.
Capacity is sold out and Aschenbrenner just filed to disclose a 5.6% stake, 12.4 million shares as a significant shareholder of record.
The man who built the most precise AI infrastructure thesis in public markets, who turned $225 million into $13.7 billion by betting on the physical backbone of AGI, looked at Nebius and bought enough shares to trigger a 13D filing.
Nebius is a core Milk Road position and our subscribers are up massively.
Come join Milk Road Pro and get the next call before everyone else figures it out. Link below/in bio.