Ex-OpenAI researcher hedge fund bets against AI chip stocks

Situational Awareness, a hedge fund specializing in artificial intelligence that was established by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a previous employee of OpenAI, is seeking to get additional funding from investors as semiconductor and AI stocks plummeted. The timing is important because this hedge fund has the biggest disclosed bet against the companies causing the drop in the stock prices of semiconductor companies.

Therefore, the act of raising money makes it more than a normal venture. It also gives us a glimpse into the perspective of one of AI’s prominent investors towards the future development of the sector. Financial Times reported that instead of investing heavily in shares of chip-producing companies, the company has developed an investment strategy that allows it to gain profits even when chip manufacturers are losing money.

A short book aimed at the AI chip trade

Situational Awareness LP revealed a U.S. equity portfolio valued at $5.52 billion in its Form 13F filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by March 31, 2026. The report showed that the fund was mainly linked to put options valued at $8.7 billion, attributed to companies in the semiconductor and AI sector. This includes $2.04 billion in VanEck Semiconductor ETF and $1.57 billion in Nvidia stocks. Investors appeared to have put more than $1 billion in put options of companies such as Oracle, Broadcom, and Advanced Micro Devices.

However, the long portfolio tells a different tale. Rather than taking a position in chip makers, the fund opted to invest in firms connected to AI infrastructure. Bloom Energy was the biggest reported position in the long portfolio with a value of $879 million, while the second biggest position was with SanDisk and CoreWeave. The fund also invested in several bitcoin miners including IREN, Core Scientific, Riot, and CleanSpark.

The fund has increased some of these investments in mining companies in the quarter which implies that the fund believes that power generation and data center infrastructure will benefit from the spread of AI in the future, instead of just relying on the prospects of semiconductor companies.

What a single session cost the fund

An unidentified X account, @LeopoldTracker_, posted an unverified estimate on July 28 about Aschenbrenner’s portfolio being down approximately $600 million in one trading session due primarily to the rapid falls of Bloom Energy and SanDisk. Cryptopolitan could not independently confirm this number.

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s fund has lost roughly $600,000,000 in a single session today

But he’s still up over 1,000% on most of these positions from his entry and his puts are printing:

• Bloom Energy, $BE, -$210,000,000 (-14.9%)
• SanDisk, $SNDK, -$180,000,000 (-11.0%)
• Core… pic.twitter.com/apL862fyLH

— Leopold Stock Tracker (@LeopoldTracker_) July 28, 2026

The estimate comes with several qualifications. Filings made under Form 13F only include some U.S. based equity assets and options for the quarter until the end of the quarter. Other financial commodities are not included, such as cash, derivatives, short positions, foreign securities, and various private investments, making them an incomplete picture of a hedge fund’s overall exposure or day-to-day gains and losses.

According to the same tracker, the fact that the fund’s sizable put positions have appreciated due to a drop in the value of chip companies may potentially offset the losses related to its long portfolio. Even if it is not possible to determine whether this is the fund’s true results from public disclosures alone, it shows that the fund’s hedged approach is entirely different from the strategy simply betting on AI stocks only.

OpenAI alum’s billion-dollar bet

Aschenbrenner first received extensive coverage in June 2024 when he released his 165-page essay, Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. In that essay, he claimed that artificial general intelligence would likely occur in 2027 and that this would lead to an “intelligence explosion” resulting in increasing expenditure on GPUs, data centers, and electricity as well as heightening the competition between the United States and China in terms of technology.

He launched Situational Awareness in September 2024 around that investment thesis. The firm’s website describes it as a global equity investor focused on AI as “the dominant driver of global market returns over the next decade.”

The proposal was well-received by investors, and by October 2025, Fortune stated that the fund had over $1.5 billion in assets under management, which is a remarkable success to achieve for a first-time fund manager in his twenties who worked for OpenAI and Sam Bankman-Fried’s charity. Supporters of the venture called him an early adopter in the field of AI infrastructure with all the critics highlighting the fact that the strategy may be too reliant on general interest in the sector.

Why the raise is a market signal

The positioning of the fund showcases its opinion which is becoming critical as investments in AI keep on changing. While Aschenbrenner holds publicly optimistic views regarding AI’s future, he has also heavily short-sold several semiconductor businesses that aided the surge while championing power suppliers, infrastructure companies, and bitcoin miners.

If he manages to bring in new investors at this point in the semiconductor downturn, this apparently demonstrates the conviction that there is more to come with the correction in chip stocks despite the investment in AI infrastructure remaining on an upswing.

In a wider context, the portfolio points to a challenge investors could be increasingly up against: belief in the rise of AI does not imply that each part of AI’s chain will be performing well at the same time. These shifts could mean that investment would go from buying GPUs to investing in power generation, networking and data center capacity, leading to the expansion of the leadership group in the AI sector beyond chip-making companies. That would reward investors who can identify which parts of the AI ecosystem are positioned to capture value at each stage of the industry’s buildout.

The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.