Dutch cloud provider Nebius popped in premarket trading Thursday after an ex-OpenAI employee’s fund disclosed a sizeable 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 on Wednesday. That represents a 5.6% stake.
Situational Awareness manages billions in funds and invests in the physical infrastructure necessary for the future of AI.
Nebius, which is listed in the U.S., was last seen up 9.6% in premarket trading. The stock is up 149% year-to-date.
Nebius shares year-to-date.
Nebius and Situational Awareness did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Nebius has emerged as a key AI compute provider in Europe and has secured several partnerships in recent months, including a $27 billion deal with Meta in March. Nebius will provide $12 billion of dedicated capacity and up to $15 billion of additional compute capacity over five years as part of the deal.
It also secured a $2 billion investment from Nvidia in the same month. The deal will see the two firms collaborate on AI infrastructure deployment, fleet management, inference and AI factory design and support.
Aschenbrenner is a German AI researcher who was hired to OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team in 2023 to ensure that superhuman AI systems are safe, but was ultimately dismissed in 2024 for allegedly leaking internal information.
He founded Situational Awareness shortly after in a bid to overcome the infrastructure bottlenecks in AI development, including energy constraints and computing power. Oracle, Nvidia, ASML, and Micron Technology are among its other holdings.
Nebius has been looking to overcome power constraints as Europe faces considerably higher electricity prices than the U.S. It announced a $2.6 billion deal with Bloom Energy last week to deploy Bloom’s fuel cell technology to generate electricity faster at its data centers in the U.S.
