In this article, we will discuss Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness 5 Under-The-Radar AI Stock Picks. Please visit Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness 12 Under-The-Radar AI Stock Picks, if you would like to see the extended list and the methodology behind it.
5. CleanSpark (NASDAQ:CLSK)
Situational Awareness Stake Value: $104,469,943
CleanSpark (NASDAQ:CLSK) is a Bitcoin miner that is attempting a partial pivot toward AI infrastructure and data center development. Unlike peers such as Core Scientific and IREN, which have already secured major hyperscaler contracts, CleanSpark has not yet landed any major hyperscale customer. In Q1, revenue fell 25% year over year amid a decline in Bitcoin price.
But let’s move beyond crypto and see what CleanSpark (NASDAQ:CLSK) plans for AI and data centers.
CleanSpark (NASDAQ:CLSK) currently has 808 MW of capacity in active use and has contracted an expansion to 1.8 GW — more than double its current operational footprint. Bulls point to this 1.8 GW of contracted power as a highly valuable asset in today’s AI economy where power is in chronic short supply.
CleanSpark (NASDAQ:CLSK) carries the highest short interest among mid, large, and mega-cap crypto stocks at 32.76% of shares outstanding as of early June 2026. CleanSpark shares are up about 63% over the past year, driven almost entirely by AI pivot enthusiasm.
4. Riot Platforms (NASDAQ:RIOT)
Situational Awareness Stake Value: $142,166,413
Situational Awareness is apparently a fan of former Bitcoin players transitioning into AI and data centers. Riot Platforms (NASDAQ:RIOT) is one such name, pivoting away from Bitcoin mining toward becoming a full-scale data center host. The stock is up roughly 90% year-to-date in 2026 amid investor enthusiasm for this strategic shift.
Its anchor deal is with AMD, under which Riot is delivering 50 MW of compute capacity at its Rockdale facility by May 2027 — starting at 35 MW from November 2026 and scaling to the full 50 MW by May 2027. AMD also holds options to expand that footprint all the way to 200 MW at Rockdale. The full 50 MW contract is expected to generate $55.6 million in annualized operating lease revenue for Riot beginning in FY2028.
Riot Platforms’ (NASDAQ:RIOT) flagship development site is its Corsicana, Texas facility, which has the potential to reach 1 GW of total capacity. About 400 MW are currently operational, and Riot has begun construction of its first core and shell building, which will add 168 MW of critical IT capacity when completed in Q2 2027. The full buildout envisions four facilities of roughly 168 MW each, totaling 756 MW of critical IT capacity at the site.
Riot Platforms (NASDAQ:RIOT) builds and operates Tier 3 data centers — large-scale facilities designed to meet the power density and reliability requirements of AI and hyperscaler workloads. Its revenue model has two components. Tenant fit-out revenue, which was $32.2 million in Q1 2026, is essentially a cost reimbursement arrangement where Riot builds out the facility to a tenant’s specifications and gets reimbursed — it carries no capital risk but also generates no recurring income. Operating lease revenue is the recurring component that scales as capacity comes online, and that is where the long-term value lies.
Wall Street forecasts roughly 28% revenue growth for fiscal 2027, with consensus revenue expected to reach $842 million, up from $659 million in 2026, and projections pointing to over $2 billion in revenue by 2029. The stock currently trades at 13.8x expected 2026 sales and 10.8x expected 2027 sales, both well above the sector median of 3.3x price-to-sales.
3. Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD)
Situational Awareness Stake Value: $319,978,118
Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) is an AI infrastructure company that builds and leases large-scale data centers to some of the biggest technology companies in the world. Its moat lies in two hard-to-replicate advantages: secured access to grid-connected power and the equipment needed to build these facilities, both of which are in acute global shortage with lead times stretching to years.
Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) recently signed a lease for Polaris Forge 3, its fourth data center campus, with a major US hyperscaler. Polaris Forge 3 is a massive facility to house and power the servers that run AI workloads. The deal runs 15 years, is worth $7.5 billion in base contracted revenue, and the tenant must pay regardless of whether it uses the capacity.
Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) has also announced a fifth campus, Delta Forge 2, located in a new southern state, adding another 210 MW of capacity under a 15-year lease worth $5.2 billion in base revenue. All five campuses combined now represent $36 billion in contracted base-term revenue, or up to $86 billion if all renewal options are exercised, with roughly 70% backed by investment-grade hyperscalers.
Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) is well-positioned to benefit from the roughly $700 billion in hyperscaler CapEx anticipated in 2027, because that spending is being driven by the rollout of Nvidia’s next-generation GPU architectures, which demand far more power than legacy data centers can supply. Applied Digital’s facilities are purpose-built for exactly these requirements.
The stock trades at 7x forward 2029 EV/sales, a meaningful discount to peers Equinix and Digital Realty, which trade at 9.35x and 9.53x, respectively.
2. Core Scientific (NASDAQ:CORZ)
Situational Awareness Stake Value: $389,086,756
Core Scientific (NASDAQ:CORZ) is another former Bitcoin miner in Situational Awareness’s portfolio that is transitioning toward AI infrastructure. Core Scientific builds and operates large-scale data centers that provide the physical infrastructure — power, cooling, and space — that AI computing requires. Its moat lies in its existing grid-connected power capacity, which is available to lease today, and its proven ability to deliver that capacity to customers on tight timelines. Most of its assets are expected to be ready for service within the 12 to 14-month window that hyperscalers and neoclouds are actively trying to fill.
Its key customer is CoreWeave, the fast-growing AI cloud provider, which has contracted 590 MW of capacity from Core Scientific in total. Core Scientific (NASDAQ:CORZ) is already billing CoreWeave for 243 MW of that, equivalent to more than $350 million in annualized revenue, with the remaining 347 MW being delivered in stages through the next 12 months. The long-term anchor from this relationship is management’s own guidance of approximately $850 million in average annual run-rate revenue from the CoreWeave contract over the next 12 years, with long-term gross margins guided at 75% to 80%.
In Q1 2026, total revenues rose 44% year over year, driven by colocation revenue, which was up 801% year-over-year.
Jackson Peak Capital stated the following regarding Core Scientific, Inc. (NASDAQ:CORZ) in its Q1 2026 investor letter:
“A position worth highlighting this quarter is Core Scientific, Inc. (NASDAQ:CORZ). We re-engaged with CORZ during Q1 after exiting in Q4, as the stock retraced to attractive levels just as we were looking to add to the AI infrastructure theme on the developments above. Specifically, CORZ is a beneficiary of the compute shortage as it has valuable data center co-location capacity, which is structurally short of supply heading into the remainder of 2026 as the leading AI labs and hyperscalers all look for power and shovel-ready sites.
CORZ is one of the few public companies with shovel-ready capacity at scale. It is a high-performance computing (HPC) colocation provider that pivoted from crypto mining to AI infrastructure, and the foundation of the business today is its ~590 MW contract with CoreWeave under 12-year hosting agreements, representing over $10 billion in total contracted revenue. Beyond the CoreWeave contract, CORZ has approximately 1.5 GW of total leasable power in the pipeline. Management has stated that they are in active dialogue with multiple parties and that colocation leasing agreements are expected in the near future.
Management is incentivized to diversify away from the single CoreWeave contract after the CoreWeave acquisition fell apart, and the entry valuation in Q1 was not pricing in any additional contracts. The catalyst path is one or more new colocation customers announced over the remainder of 2026, each of which should drive a re-rating as revenue grows and concentration risk declines. The primary risks are execution, the pace of new customer signings, and the broader AI spending cycle.”
1. IREN (NASDAQ:IREN)
Situational Awareness Stake Value: $401,036,064
IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) is one of the top holdings in Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness portfolio as of Q1 2026. The company is in the middle of transitioning from a Bitcoin miner into a pure-play AI infrastructure provider. Crypto mining still accounts for roughly 77% of total revenue, but bulls are focused more on where the business is heading than where it stands today.
The AI side is growing fast. In fiscal Q3, AI cloud revenue rose 94% year over year. IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) currently has $3.1 billion in annual recurring revenue. This revenue is locked in under long-term contracts that renew on a predictable basis. The key deal is a five-year, $9.7 billion agreement with Microsoft signed in November 2025, under which IREN’s GPUs will be used to provide cloud services to the tech giant. On top of that, IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) secured a $3.4 billion five-year contract with Nvidia in early 2026 to build an AI cloud platform running Blackwell GPUs.
Bulls also point to two recent acquisitions. The first was Nostrum Group, a data center developer with terms undisclosed, which adds a local team in Spain and expands IREN (NASDAQ:IREN)’s guaranteed grid connectivity by 480 MW — addressing one of the key bottlenecks in scaling AI infrastructure. The second was Mirantis, a cloud software provider acquired for $625 million in shares, which brings roughly 1,500 corporate clients and deep expertise in managing AI computing workloads. This acquisition is significant because IREN had the hardware but lacked the software layer needed to offer customers a complete cloud environment — Mirantis fills that gap and should also help IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) shift from volatile spot contracts toward more predictable recurring revenue.
While we acknowledge the potential of IREN to grow, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than IREN and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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