Situational Awareness Invests $400M After Near-Collapse
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Situational Awareness deployed $400 million into an undisclosed private company on Tuesday, days after assets fell about 78% in July amid an AI-stock sell-off that triggered margin calls from Wall Street lenders.
- Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund had already invested $100 million in the same unnamed company in July, per Bloomberg, meaning the latest bet roughly quadruples the position even as the public book collapsed.
- Situational Awareness sold most of its public equity portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel to repay lenders, allowing the fund to retain its private holdings through the crisis, according to the Financial Times.
- The fund had concentrated its thesis in power and data centers supporting AI, including Bitcoin miners pivoting into AI computing, per Bloomberg and FT reporting.
- A May 18 SEC filing showed roughly $1.11 billion in positions across seven Bitcoin mining stocks as of March 31, including IREN, Core Scientific, Riot Platforms, and CleanSpark.
Why it matters: After losing 78% of assets in July's AI-stock rout, Situational Awareness liquidated its public book to Citadel to satisfy lenders — yet still quadrupled its bet on the same unnamed private company, suggesting the fund's private AI-infrastructure thesis survived the margin-call crisis while public-market exposure did not.
