AI stock surges after an ex-OpenAI employee’s fund disclosed a stake

Dutch cloud provider nebius It exploded in premarket trading on Thursday after a former OpenAI employee’s fund disclosed a large stake in the firm.

Situational Awareness, a hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, now owns 12.4 million Class A shares of the AI ​​firm, according to a filing published Wednesday. This represents a 5.6% stake.

Situational Awareness manages billions of dollars in funds and invests in the physical infrastructure needed for the future of AI.

US-listed Nebius was last seen up 9.6% in pre-market trading. The stock is up 149% year-to-date.

Nebius has emerged as a major AI computing provider in Europe and has secured several partnerships in recent months, including a $27 billion deal. Meta In March. As part of the agreement, Nebius will provide $12 billion in dedicated capacity and up to $15 billion in additional computing capacity over five years.

It also provided an investment of $2 billion Nvidia in the same month. The agreement will see the two companies collaborate on AI infrastructure deployment, fleet management, inference and AI factory design and support.

Aschenbrenner is a German AI researcher who was recruited to OpenAI’s “Super Alignment” team in 2023 to ensure that superhuman AI systems were safe, but was eventually dismissed, allegedly in 2024. leaking internal information.

He soon founded Situational Awareness to overcome infrastructure bottlenecks in AI development, including energy constraints and computing power. Seernvidia, ASMLAnd Micron Technology among its other holdings.

Nebius is looking for ways to overcome power constraints as Europe faces much higher electricity prices compared to the United States. Last week, it announced a $2.6 billion deal with Bloom Energy to use Bloom’s fuel cell technology to generate electricity faster at data centers in the United States.