TBPN

The New Situational Awareness 13F Is Here

May 18, 2026

Happy Monday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is the new Situational Awareness 13F.

Today’s lineup

New York Times Tech Reporter Mike Isaac at 11:45 AM
Redis CEO Rowan Trollope at 12:10 PM
Decart Co-Founder & CEO Dean Leitersdorf at 12:30 PM
Author & Journalist Joanna Stern at 1:00 PM

Run of Show

Situational Awareness files hotly anticipated 13F

Situational Awareness’s latest 13F is now public. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the hedge fund’s Chief Investment Officer, is known for making extremely successful investments based on his core assumption that frontier AI will continue to improve at 0.5 OOMs (orders of magnitude) per year, which translates into a thesis that AI will create unprecedented demand for compute and its associated bottlenecks.

There’s a ton of discourse around it on the timeline, mostly because the filing shows he’s made some massive puts across the semiconductor sector (e.g. ~$2B on SMH, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF). But the filing is hard to interpret cleanly. A 13F is only a snapshot of holdings as of March 31, 2026, meaning these positions were in place during the early phase of the Iran war. And while 13Fs do disclose put/call positions, they don’t disclose the strike prices, expirations, premiums paid, hedge ratios, short positions, swaps, or whether the options are part of broader structures.

This tweet by fejua sums up this dynamic nicely. — Brandon

AI Backlash Continues

Big pushback on AI data centers across the board. It’s both a left- and right-wing issue now (as predicted during Saagar Enjeti’s TBPN appearance last year). The latest debate is over a huge data center in Utah that’s being championed by Shark Tank’s Mr. Wonderful (Kevin O’Leary). He’s a bit of an over-the-top caricature of a businessman, recently seen sporting not one, but two expensive watches at the Oscars (a Cartier Crash Skeleton and a Ruby Rolex Daytona). It makes him a bit of a soft target for anyone who wants to paint data center construction as maybe not in the best interest of average Americans. But the Utah data center project actually seems pretty by the book according to current plans. It’s in a remote area, uses its own power and water, and doesn’t seem to disrupt any local communities. Quick Thoughts has a good breakdown. These points are going to be hard to breakthrough though, because AI is just so deeply unpopular. Just watch this video of Eric Schmidt getting booed while giving a commencement speech.

There are like 10 different problems to solve in order to turn the tide here. AI has to make more cool things, everyone is vibecoding 24/7 and leaving their MacBook Pros open so they can work while they are at parties, but we aren’t seeing delightful new consumer apps pop up in any meaningful way. Then AI also has to create jobs, or at least the job market has to independently strengthen. On the data center side, addressing environmental impact (probably real), water use (mostly fake), noise (solvable), and a bunch of other issues is not going to happen magically. Ben Thompson had a good analysis of “Data Center Discontent” today in Stratechery and shared a pretty simple solution:

Just to put some numbers on this, the data center up the road was expected to be 1.6 GW, which could generate around $3 billion in annual operator revenue. DeForest, the village it was to be built in, has around 11,500 people. You could pay every person in DeForest $10,000 a year for 3.8% of annual revenue grossed by the data center — I bet that proposal would have been approved, and I bet that the operator could very easily pass those costs on to the actual data center users (it also highlights how relatively pathetic QTS’s $50 million commitment was).

All the big labs like to say that “things get weird” in the AI era, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see lots of weird twists and turns in the data center buildout and accompanying pushback. — John

Chinese fast-fashion company Shein buys Everlane

Puck News has reported that Shein, the Chinese company known for pioneering algorithmically driven fashion trends on the back of extremely inexpensive clothing, has acquired Everlane in a deal valued at $100M. The transaction follows years of financial strain at Everlane during which the company took on about $90M in debt. Lots of takes on the timeline about this, one of the most salient throughlines being that Everlane — which built its brand on transparency and ethical operations — essentially sold out to one of the least scrupulous companies in the fashion category (at least along the ethical dimension). — Brandon

What’s the root cause of falling birth rates?

The Financial Times has a great deep dive in The Big Read about falling birth rates. The screenshot that went viral puts most of the blame on the rise of smartphones. The actual article covers lots of different factors and highlights rising housing costs as a big piece of the puzzle, but the data around smartphone adoption is pretty convincing. Ross Douthat and others shared that, outside of the temporary baby boom in the mid-20th century, birth rates have been falling steadily since 1800. There’s an interesting debate around what happens if you try to go a layer deeper into the question. What apps specifically are causing a birth rate decline (if you buy that conclusion)? Is it dating apps that create unrealistic expectations? Social media sites that flood you with videos of lives just out of reach, but worth delaying family formation for a shot at? Video games? Gambling? Etc etc. The smartphone is such a bundle of features (famously a phone, iPod, and an “Internet Communicator”). I don’t think it’s music on demand that’s causing people to put off having kids, but is there a version of a smartphone, or a series of apps that cause stronger relationships to develop? Maybe the next study should be comparing screen time or specific content that’s served to adults who have kids vs. those who don’t. All this is interesting because as fast as the AI takeoff is going, many of the social and economic changes that we actually see showing up in the world are just taking shape after two decades of smartphones and social media diffusion. It does give a lot of credence to the “we should be very thoughtful about how technology rolls out earlier than ever” arguments. — John

Clip Spotlight: SemiAnalysis President Doug O’Laughlin on the Cerebras IPO

Here’s what he said last week on TBPN:

"There is a narrow path for them. I think they're going to be able to inference maybe 1 trillion parameters and very small context window sizes. Or smaller models at very fast speeds."

"There's demand. Clearly, we're in a shortage, and ironically in a shortage, it's not the best company who wins — you can look at Nvidia's stock chart and that will tell you."

"It's the second, third, and fourth-best companies where the demand overflows. And we're seeing all that today."

"The reality is the market's big enough for a lot of demand, and Cerebras is in that space."

"They've done a really good job, and it's a cool engineering problem. But we think it's kind of a solution looking for a problem. Because the world of LLMs blew up at a much faster scale than anyone would have ever thought."

Headlines

NYT: Jury Rejects Musk’s Claim Against OpenAI

Situational Awareness releases 13F

FT: Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once

Puck: Everlane Is Selling Out… to Shein

Stratechery: Data Center Discontent, Understanding the Opposition, Fixing the Problem

Nic Carter: AI is not hiking your electricity bill – yet

Non-Public Policy: In Defense of the Data Center

NBC: A trade boost and a new relationship status: U.S. touts modest China deals after summit’s good vibes

FT: In America, wealth taxes mean wealth flight

FT: The fate of OpenAI’s $1tn IPO will be decided in an Oakland jury room

WSJ: Amazon Web Services CEO Pushes Back on AI Job Apocalypse Warnings