NEW YORK ‒ Situational Awareness LP, the $20 billion AI-focused hedge fund launched by 25-year-old former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has sold off its entire public stock portfolio in a massive block trade following weeks of compounding losses across technology, hardware, and semiconductor holdings.
Sources familiar with the matter told CNBC that major Wall Street prime brokerages, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America, stepped in to help orchestrate an orderly unwind of the fund’s leveraged positions to meet mounting margin calls.
From Market Darling to Emergency Liquidation
Launched in late 2024 following Aschenbrenner’s high-profile departure from OpenAI and his viral series of essays on the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Situational Awareness LP quickly became one of the breakout stars of the current tech cycle.
The major Silicon Valley luminaries, like Patric and John Collion, the co-founders of Stripe, Nat Friedman, who was the CEO of GitHub, and the Daniel Gross, the investor, they were all the backerrrs of the fund. And what is truly remarkable is that the fund generated an extraordinary net return of 439% until June 30 2026 which is no small feat.
However, the fund’s extreme concentration in high-beta AI infrastructure plays combined with heavy leverage left it acutely exposed to July’s deep pullback across Asian and U.S. tech stocks.
What Triggered the Unwind?
According to regulatory filings and market reports, several core drivers forced the fund’s rapid portfolio liquidation:
- Hardware & Compute Collapse: Core long positions including Nebius, CoreWeave, Micron Technology, and SK Hynix suffered steep drops exceeding 35% over the past month.
- Asian Tech Volatility: A sharp sell-off across South Korean and broader Asian tech indexes hit the fund’s international positions particularly hard, compounding margin pressures.
- Adverse Software Movements: Hedging strategies and short positions against select software equities swung unexpectedly against the portfolio, squeezing liquidity from both sides.
- Leverage Amplification: Operating with a lean team of just four investment professionals, the fund heavily utilized prime brokerage leverage to maximize long exposure during the 2025–2026 AI rally.
Key Portfolio Assets Impacted
Asset / Holding | Type | Status & Recent Performance |
Nebius & CoreWeave | Cloud / GPU Infrastructure | Down >35% in July; positions fully liquidated |
Micron & SK Hynix | High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) | Heavily hit during global semiconductor pullbacks |
Bloom Energy | AI Power & Energy Grid | Liquidated as part of Thursday’s block trade |
Anthropic (Private) | Private Foundation Model | Stakes actively offered to prospective secondary buyers |
Emergency Capital Search & Market Impact
Beyond liquidating its public stock book to an undisclosed single buyer before Thursday’s opening bell, Aschenbrenner has been in ad-hoc discussions with limited partners and institutional lenders to raise emergency capital.
In letters sent to investors, Aschenbrenner stated that they still completely believe in the larger economic scenario for how we build AGI around macroeconomics, saying the sharp drop in stocks is “one of the best chances to buy that investors have seen since early 2025.”
To bolster balance sheet liquidity, the firm is also exploring secondary sales of its private startup equity, including a portion of its sizable stake in AI developer Anthropic ahead of a widely anticipated IPO later this year.
Despite the abrupt unwind, markets absorbed the block trade smoothly, with several heavily shorted hardware and memory names recovering lost ground during Thursday morning trading as margin overhang fears cleared.
