Citadel acquires $16B in public equities, averting AI stock fire sale

Ken Griffin has a reputation for knowing when to buy what everyone else is forced to sell. On July 30, 2026, Citadel put that reputation to work, acquiring the bulk of a $16 billion public equities portfolio from Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund that had just received the kind of phone call no fund manager wants: a margin call. The move kept a massive block of AI infrastructure stocks off the open market, preventing what could have been a disorderly selloff across a sector that was already having a rough month. How a $45B fund ended up at the negotiating table Situational Awareness was, until recently, one of the more remarkable stories in hedge fund land. Founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner, who was 24 or 25 years old at the time, the fund had ballooned to roughly $45 billion in assets under management by early July 2026. That is a lot of capital for a young fund with a concentrated thesis. The portfolio leaned heavily into AI infrastructure, with significant positions in companies like SK Hynix and CoreWeave, names that sit at the hardware and compute backbone of the current AI buildout. When AI stocks turned volatile, leveraged positions amplified the damage fast. Th...