Key points
- A confidential tender document reported by Australian media says Anthropic could spend $15 billion (about AU$21.6 billion) to lock up 1.4 gigawatts of data center capacity in Australia, with a final decision still about six weeks out and no partner named.
- Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund owns both IREN and SharonAI (SHAZ), but not in the same proportion: his SharonAI stake is nearly 20% of the whole company, while his IREN stake is only about 3% of IREN's shares outstanding.
- Aschenbrenner is engaged to Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and reportedly his only direct report, a real and publicly reported connection, not an allegation of anything improper.
- Both stocks already sold off hard into the holiday weekend, IREN down about 10% and SHAZ down about 14% from Wednesday to Thursday's close, before this tender report even surfaced.
Our fund tracker has been watching Leopold Aschenbrenner's bets on Australian AI infrastructure since his fund showed up in SharonAI (SHAZ). There's a fresh reason to look closer this week: a report that Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, is weighing a huge data center buildout in the same country Aschenbrenner has already been positioning around. Size up his two Australia bets side by side, though, and one of them looks a lot more deliberate than the other.
What the tender document says
According to a confidential tender document cited by Australian outlets, Anthropic wants to secure at least 1.4 million kilowatts, that's 1.4 gigawatts, of computing capacity in Australia. About 1 million kilowatts would come online by the end of 2027. The whole build could run around $15 billion, or about AU$21.6 billion at current exchange rates. A final investment decision is expected in roughly six weeks, and the project could be split into four or five smaller contracts instead of going to one builder.
This follows a memorandum of understanding Anthropic signed with the Australian government in March, after CEO Dario Amodei met with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Canberra. That MoU is a statement of intent, not a signed deal. Amodei's own words on it: Anthropic is "exploring investments in data center infrastructure and energy throughout the country." Nobody has named a site, a builder, or a cloud partner yet.
Aschenbrenner's two Australia bets aren't sized the same
Aschenbrenner runs Situational Awareness LP, the AI-focused fund built on the "Situational Awareness" essay that made him famous after he left OpenAI. His most recent 13F, covering positions as of March 31 and filed May 18, showed $13.68 billion in reportable securities and 11.7 million shares of IREN, up from 8.7 million three months earlier. IREN has roughly 357 million shares outstanding, so that stake works out to about 3 percent of the company. It's a real position, just not a controlling one.
SharonAI (SHAZ) is a different story. Aschenbrenner's fund first disclosed a small SharonAI position in that same May 13F, then took it to 19.9 percent of the company in a June 30 Schedule 13G, about 1.7 million shares plus warrants for another 6.4 million, capped at a 19.99 percent ownership limit pending shareholder approval. The fund also co-anchored a $1.6 billion private placement earmarked for SharonAI's Nvidia buildout in Australia. We covered that filing in detail here.
Put those two numbers next to each other and the picture changes. About 3 percent of IREN versus nearly 20 percent of SharonAI is not a diversified basket. It looks like a fund that owns a small slice of the big, established Australian AI infrastructure name, and a big slice, close to the legal cap, of the small one.
The Anthropic connection worth knowing about
Here's a detail that's been public for a while but matters more now. Aschenbrenner is engaged to Avital Balwit, who is chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and by Amodei's own account his only direct report. That relationship has been reported since 2025, confirmed on the record by a Situational Awareness spokesperson. It's not new, and it's not a secret.
To be clear about what this is and isn't: we're not alleging that any nonpublic Anthropic information found its way into a stock pick, and we have no evidence that it did. Aschenbrenner's filings are public, legal disclosures, the kind any large investor has to make. But it's a fact readers should have in front of them. A fund run by someone engaged to a top Anthropic executive has built one of its largest bets, by percentage owned, in a small Australian Nvidia Cloud Partner, right as Anthropic is reported to be shopping a multibillion-dollar Australian data center plan. Draw your own conclusions. We just think you should have the full picture before you do.
IREN is the bigger, safer way to play it
IREN is the more established of the two. It was founded in Sydney in 2018 by Daniel Roberts and William Roberts as a bitcoin miner and kept its Australian headquarters while pivoting hard into AI and HPC, a shift we covered in our look at IREN's move from bitcoin miner to AI stock. In June, it signed a transmission agreement for an 800 megawatt data center campus at Bundey in South Australia, on track to start energizing from 2028. It already has real hyperscaler and chipmaker contracts: a five-year, $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft and a five-year, $3.4 billion deal with Nvidia. At a market cap near $13.9 billion, it's a much bigger and more liquid stock than SharonAI.
SharonAI is the smaller, riskier, more concentrated bet
SharonAI was founded in December 2024 and is one of only three Nvidia Cloud Partners in Australia. Its six-year Nvidia collaboration, worth up to $4.88 billion, covers 72 megawatts of new Australian data center capacity and as many as 40,000 of Nvidia's Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs, with more than 55,000 total Nvidia GPUs expected deployed by mid-2027. On June 15 it added a deal with VAST Data to build a 600 petabyte storage backbone sized for around 100,000 GPUs. Its market cap has grown to about $2.1 billion, but it's still unprofitable, with a float of only about 12.6 million shares, the same float that took it from a $0.99 low last July to a $97.48 high in June.
Side by side
| IREN | SharonAI (SHAZ) | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Sydney, Australia | New York, US |
| Founded | 2018 | December 2024 |
| Market cap | about $13.9 billion | about $2.1 billion |
| Australia capacity | 800 MW campus in Bundey, SA, energizing from 2028 | 72 MW with Nvidia, part of a 40,000 GPU build |
| Key partners | Microsoft ($9.7B deal), Nvidia ($3.4B deal) | Nvidia (up to $4.88B), VAST Data |
| Situational Awareness stake | 11.7 million shares, about 3% of the company | 19.9% of the company |
| Thursday close (Jul 2) | $38.83, down about 10% on the day | $67.87, down about 14% on the day |
Neither stock has confirmed anything, and both just sold off
It's worth being clear about what hasn't happened. Anthropic hasn't named IREN, SharonAI, or anyone else as a partner for this tender. Its confirmed compute relationships run through Microsoft Azure, Amazon (up to 5 gigawatts), and Google, not directly through either Australian company. The tender report is about physical data center capacity, a different layer of the stack, and it's still about six weeks from even a final investment decision.
Worth noting too: Australian reporting on Anthropic's broader plans has already named a different set of operators in the room, NEXTDC, AirTrunk, and Canberra Data Centres, established colocation giants, not IREN or SharonAI. If either of our two stocks ends up touching this specific tender, it's more likely to show up as a landlord, power supplier, or compute layer than as the headline counterparty. A separate OpenAI project with NextDC, a roughly $4.5 billion Sydney site announced late last year, is sometimes confused with Anthropic's plans online. It's OpenAI's deal, not Anthropic's.
Meanwhile, both stocks were already sliding into the holiday weekend. IREN closed Thursday at $38.83, down about 10 percent from Wednesday's $43.32. SHAZ closed at $67.87, down about 14 percent from Wednesday's $79.11. Neither move has an obvious single cause tied to this report, and both stocks trade at high multiples on thin floats, so sharp swings in either direction aren't unusual for this group, something we've also seen play out across the wider bitcoin miner and AI data center basket. U.S. markets were closed Friday for the July 4 holiday weekend and reopen Monday, July 6.
What to watch
If Anthropic's Australia plan moves forward, watch whether it names specific site operators or builders, how the four or five smaller contracts get carved up, and whether IREN or SharonAI show up as counterparties, directly or through a hyperscaler intermediary. It's also worth watching whether Aschenbrenner's fund adds to either position once the picture is clearer, especially the SharonAI stake given how close it already sits to its ownership cap. Track his filings on our Situational Awareness fund page, and see our explainer on how 13F filings work for context on the lag in what we can see. None of this is investment advice. It's a real report about a large potential buildout, sitting next to two stocks a notable investor already owns in very different sizes, with no confirmed connection between the tender and either company yet.
