Situational Awareness bets $400M on chip startup
Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund run by Leopold Aschenbrenner, invested $400 million earlier this week inufactured The investment brings Situational Awareness’s total stake in
The investment comes weeks after Situational Awareness narrowly avoided collapse when lenders began issuing margin calls after a steep decline in its public technology holdings. The fund had used significant leverage and built its public portfolio around AI infrastructure companies that lost value. Its total assets dropped to around $10 billion from $45 billion at the start of July.
To stabilize the fund, Aschenbrenner arranged the sale of the bulk of its equity positions — among them stakes in memory chipmakers SK Hynix and Sandisk, AI cloud platform Nebius Group, and hydrogen power company Bloom Energy — to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. Situational Awareness kept its private portfolio intact, among them its stake in Anthropic along with holdings in cloud computing firm Fluidstack and semiconductor startup MatX.
Situational Awareness was founded in 2024 by Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher. The fund pursues an unusual hybrid model, placing capital in pre-revenue private ventures alongside positions in public equities — a combination that the Journal noted is rare among investment funds. Earlier this year, the fund joined Lux Capital in anchoring an approximately $1 billion round for Physical Intelligence, a robotics AI startup, which the deal valued at $11.5 billion.
