Leopold Aschenbrenner’s latest regulatory filing shows Situational Awareness loaded up on a group of artificial intelliegence stocks just before they became some of the market’s biggest casualties in July. The hedge fund’s five largest disclosed stock holdings at the end of June were Sandisk , Micron Technology , Bloom Energy , Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Nebius Group , according to a 13F filing released Friday. All five were hammered the following month as the AI trade abruptly reversed, helping push the fund to the brink and forcing it to unload much of its public-equity portfolio to Citadel. Sandisk, the fund’s largest U.S.-listed position at $5.7 billion, plunged almost 47% in July. Micron, close behind at $5.6 billion, tumbled nearly 29%. Bloom Energy slid 32%, while Taiwan Semiconductor lost 15% and Nebius slumped 31%. The filing showed Aschenbrenner was adding aggressively to several of the stocks that would soon bear the brunt of the AI selloff. The fund also held $745 million of CoreWeave , another AI infrastructure name caught in the July rout. Situational Awareness had built its strategy around one of Wall Street’s hottest trades: owning companies expected to provide the memory chips, data centers, power and other infrastructure required for the AI boom, while betting against software companies Aschenbrenner viewed as vulnerable to disruption from AI itself. The strategy worked spectacularly for much of the fund’s short history. Before July’s decline, Situational Awareness had generated gains of more than 1,000% since inception, the Wall Street Journal reported in June. At its peak earlier this summer, the fund sat atop roughly $45 billion in assets. But the sudden reversal in many of its biggest stock bets, compounded by losses on the other side of its portfolio and the use of leverage, quickly turned into a liquidity crunch. By July 30, after being forced to offload its leveraged stock bets โ including hard-hit names such as SK Hynix and CoreWeave โ to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a discount, the fund’s holdings had fallen to around $10 billion. The 13F only captures U.S.-listed long positions held as of June 30 and therefore doesn’t provide a complete picture of Situational Awareness’s exposures or the trades that ultimately drove its losses.
