Aschenbrenner’s fund loaded up on memory stocks before 67% loss

Recent filings with the SEC show that Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness AI hedge fund had almost fifty percent of its US equity portfolio invested in SanDisk and Micron before a liquidation event that occurred in July, wiping out 67% of the fund’s value in just one month.

To the overall AI sector, the reveal indicates where investments have turned. The stocks that plummeted, Situational Awareness, are also part of companies benefiting from the AI data center boom, which serves as a caution of how limited the business was becoming.

Where the money sat before the fall

Situational Awareness LP submitted its 13F-HR to the SEC on August 14, with holdings reported as of June 30, prior to the liquidation in July. SanDisk and Micron constituted approximately 50% of the reported equity assets, making the fund very much vulnerable to one aspect of the AI supply chain.

This was not the only significant investment made by the fund. Another Form 13F for the quarter that ended on March 31, and that was revealed by Cryptopolitan on July 30, showed a portfolio of US equities valued at $5.52 billion and $8.7 billion in put options relating to chip companies. The top long position was Bloom Energy, with $879 million invested, behind which were SanDisk and CoreWeave.

Situational Awareness’ March 31 filing showed $13.68 billion in 13F securities, but that figure shouldn’t be confused with the fund’s total assets or its overall economic exposure.

Why memory chips became the AI trade

The pull towards SanDisk and Micron was matched by an actual shift in demand. Counterpoint Research noted that due to the transition from training to inference for AI workloads, the market saw the share of enterprise SSDs increase to 48% of total NAND shipments in Q2 2026.

Prices are expected to follow the trend. According to TrendForce, NAND Flash revenue will rise by 10% to 15% from quarter to quarter in the third quarter of 2026, while DRAM prices will rise by 13% to 18%, owing to the high demand for AI inference and purchases of massive data centers. Micron also reported record fiscal third-quarter earnings of $41.46 billion, which is significantly more than the earnings of $9.30 billion for the same period one year ago.

The lesson leveraged taught in July

Having comprehension of the proper trends didn’t shield the fund from losing money. Situational Awareness advised its investors that it registered an unaudited 67% loss in July, while still close to 80% in terms of the year-to-date return. Aschenbrenner noted that the fund disposed of a part of the publicly available portfolio to lower leverage once liquidity was exhausted. Reuters confirmed the 67% loss for July and the disposal of the major part of its public assets.

Aschenbrenner acknowledged the risk directly in his letter to investors:

“We embrace volatility. But it should never jeopardize the fund.”

He also wrote that the fund had taken steps “to fight another day.”

On July 28, an anonymous X account, @LeopoldTracker_, published an estimated loss of $600 million for Aschenbrenner’s portfolio due to the declines in Bloom Energy and SanDisk. However, Cryptopolitan was not able to verify such information; in addition, 13F filings do not include cash, short positions, and personal investments.

Aschenbrenner remains firmly committed to AI. His investment firm put $400 million into Source Foundry, a stealth semiconductor-equipment startup, which has a valuation close to $5 billion and specializes in lithography, a bottleneck in chip-making dominated by ASML.

What a $7 trillion build-out rides on

This occurrence comes about as predictions indicate that staggering AI investments will take place. Goldman Sachs holds the opinion that nearly $7.6 trillion will be spent on computing, data centers, and power between 2026 and 2031.

The Semiconductor Industry Association and Deloitte say that over 95% of the value of an AI server rack is made up of semiconductors, with the investment in data-center infrastructure potentially reaching $4 trillion by 2028.

That scale is why the fund’s stumble matters beyond one manager. A conviction that AI will grow does not guarantee every link in its supply chain rises together, or that leveraged, concentrated positions survive a liquidity squeeze. The filing shows an investor who read the demand correctly yet still got caught by the way he financed the bet.

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