Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund buys significant stakes in AI stocks after brutal summer drawdown

Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher who parlayed his AI thesis into one of the most aggressive hedge funds in recent memory, is buying again. His fund, Situational Awareness LP, has been snapping up significant positions in CoreWeave, SanDisk, Bloom Energy, and AMD through the options market, a move that signals the 27-year-old is far from done betting on the physical backbone of artificial intelligence. This is notable because just two months ago, his fund lost 67% of its value in a single month. Most people would take a breather after that. Aschenbrenner apparently took a weekend. From $225 million to $45 billion, and back Aschenbrenner founded the fund in 2024 with $225 million in seed capital, backed by a who’s-who of tech luminaries including Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and investor Daniel Gross. The thesis was straightforward, if maximally aggressive: AI needs physical infrastructure, and the companies building that infrastructure are undervalued. So the fund loaded up on the picks-and-shovels plays. By Q1 2026, the portfolio included roughly $879 million in Bloom Energy, $724 million in SanDisk, and $556 milli...