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Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher who parlayed his AI thesis into one of the most aggressive hedge funds in recent memory, is buying again. His fund, Situational Awareness LP, has been snapping up significant positions in CoreWeave, SanDisk, Bloom Energy, and AMD through the options market, a move that signals the 27-year-old is far from done betting on the physical backbone of artificial intelligence.
This is notable because just two months ago, his fund lost 67% of its value in a single month. Most people would take a breather after that. Aschenbrenner apparently took a weekend.
From $225 million to $45 billion, and back
Aschenbrenner founded the fund in 2024 with $225 million in seed capital, backed by a who’s-who of tech luminaries including Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and investor Daniel Gross.
The thesis was straightforward, if maximally aggressive: AI needs physical infrastructure, and the companies building that infrastructure are undervalued. So the fund loaded up on the picks-and-shovels plays. By Q1 2026, the portfolio included roughly $879 million in Bloom Energy, $724 million in SanDisk, and $556 million in CoreWeave.
The fund’s assets peaked at nearly $45 billion by mid-2026, a return that turns $225 million in seed capital into a number that makes venture capitalists feel inadequate.
Then July happened.
The fund posted a negative 67% return for the month. The losses triggered margin calls, and the bulk of the fund’s public equity holdings were sold to Citadel in what amounted to a forced liquidation.
The silver lining, if you can call it that: the fund was still up 80% on the year even after the July bloodbath. And its private portfolio, including a multi-billion-dollar stake in Anthropic, remained intact through the sell-off.
Back at the table
By early September, analysts had flagged large purchases of call options on AI-related stocks totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in premiums. The positions span CoreWeave, SanDisk, Bloom Energy, and AMD.
In August, the fund also made a $400 million investment in Source Foundry, a private company, suggesting the fire sale didn’t completely drain the war chest.
What the AI infrastructure bet says about the market
Bloom Energy is a fuel cell manufacturer that has become increasingly relevant as AI data centers strain existing power grids. SanDisk, the storage giant, benefits from the exponential growth in data that AI training and inference require. CoreWeave is a GPU cloud provider that has positioned itself as a direct competitor to traditional hyperscalers for AI workloads. AMD continues to challenge Nvidia in the AI chip market.
For investors watching from the sidelines, the Situational Awareness saga is a case study in the extreme volatility that comes with concentrated, leveraged bets on a single sector thesis. The fund went from $225 million to $45 billion to a margin-call fire sale in under two years. Now it’s rebuilding with the same playbook. The names backing the fund, from the Collison brothers to Friedman and Gross, suggest that the people closest to AI development still find the thesis compelling enough to ride through the turbulence.
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