We just covered the From Fired Researcher to $13.7 Billion King: How Leopold Aschenbrenner Broke the Hedge Fund World and Cipher Digital Inc. (NASDAQ:CIFR) ranks 31st on this list.
Filings for the first quarter of 2026 show that Leopold Aschenbrenner has sold off the stake his hedge fund had in Cipher Digital Inc. (NASDAQ:CIFR). In the fourth quarter of 2025, the fund owned 10.4 million shares in the company. Cipher develops and operates industrial-scale data centers for bitcoin mining and high-performance compute hosting in the United States. It develops HPC data center facilities across various sites for hyperscaler tenants, and operates power at one bitcoin mining data center. It also maintains a pipeline across various sites. Aschenbrenner has generally been bullish on Bitcoin miners turning to AI compute.
However, he has sold off his Cipher Digital Inc. (NASDAQ:CIFR) holding. The primary operational pillar of the bear case is that the legacy revenue engine of the firm is being disassembled far faster than the HPC data center revenues are coming online, leading to structural underperformance. For Q1 2026, Cipher reported revenue of just $34.84 million. This represents a 41.7% collapse sequentially from the $60 million recorded in Q4 2025, driven by the winding down of mining operations at the Black Pearl site. The company reported a GAAP net loss of $114.3 million, $0.28 per diluted share, missing consensus analyst estimates of a $0.23–$0.24 loss per share. This is a severe year-over-year widening from the $39 million net loss reported in Q1 2025. Operating momentum remains deeply negative, with the company posting an Adjusted EBITDA of negative $48 million for the quarter.
While we acknowledge the potential of CIFR as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you’re looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.
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