The fund that was the purest available expression of the AI infrastructure trade stopped expressing it on Thursday. Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, sold the bulk of its public stock positions to Ken Griffin's Citadel in a single transaction, according to people familiar with the deal. Both sides of the book went at once: the shares the fund owned outright, and the shares it had borrowed and sold in bets that prices would fall.
The fund had grown to as much as $45 billion at the start of July and was up 439% after fees through the end of June. What ended the run was plumbing rather than thesis. Several of the banks that lend Situational Awareness money against its holdings, among them Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, had been working with the fund to meet margin requirements or reduce positions in an orderly way. When a fund buys with borrowed money and the collateral falls, the lender asks for cash. The fund finds it or it sells.
The sale caps a fast unwind. The Financial Times reported overnight, and The Latent covered on Thursday morning, that Aschenbrenner had approached investors and lenders for fresh capital, with some investors offered the chance to buy assets out of the portfolio directly. That was the position hours ago. By midday the portfolio had a buyer.
CNBC described the episode as an "early and potentially significant test" of the idea that made Aschenbrenner one of the most watched figures in AI investing. The old state of affairs was two years in which anything supplying the AI buildout went up, and a 25-year-old who had written the essays explaining why. The new one is that the most leveraged version of that argument was liquidated by its own lenders' collateral rules, not by anyone changing their mind about AI. For anyone holding the same stocks, that distinction is the whole story.
What Citadel bought
The losing longs were the buildout names: SK Hynix, the South Korean memory chipmaker, along with SanDisk, Micron and the AI data center operator CoreWeave. Situational Awareness was a cornerstone investor in SK Hynix's Nasdaq listing on July 10, taking part in a $5 billion anchor allocation at $149 per receipt. Those shares closed Wednesday at $126.79.
The other half of the damage came from the short book. The fund had bet against software companies including Adobe, on the reasoning that AI would erode their pricing power. Software held up while chips fell, which meant those positions lost money at the same time as the longs. A hedge that moves the wrong way at the wrong moment is not a hedge.
The names rallied hard once the overhang cleared. SK Hynix rose 16% on Thursday, back to roughly its listing price. Nebius gained 29%, SanDisk 24%, CoreWeave 24% and Micron 16%. Adobe fell 7%. Attribution is not clean, though: Microsoft rose about 9% after strong Azure results the previous evening, and the Nasdaq Composite was up across the board after the Nasdaq 100 entered a correction on Wednesday, meaning a fall of at least 10% from its peak.
The price Citadel paid is not public
Every number that would settle this is missing, and the important one is new. Nobody has reported what Citadel paid relative to where the stocks were marked on Wednesday, and that figure decides how much of the 439% survives. The size of the losses is still unreported, as it was this morning, and it is still unclear whether the sale covered the margin calls.
The fund's own size is reported three different ways. The Financial Times put assets at about $20 billion, CNBC has used $24 billion, and the $45 billion figure is a July peak. Those numbers have not been reconciled publicly, and they measure different things.
Accounts also differ on how complete the exit was. Bloomberg reported the fund still holds private stakes including Anthropic and has not sold every public position. A spokesman disputed reports that the firm was shopping its Anthropic stake, which has been estimated at about a fifth of the portfolio. That holding does not trade daily and does not reprice when the Nasdaq does, so the visible damage and the actual damage remain separate figures.
Aschenbrenner's July 24 letter to investors, which said the fund had "not been immune" to the swings, called the selloff the best entry point since early 2025 and opened a window for investors to add money on August 1. That window opens Saturday. Whoever puts money in will be funding a book that no longer contains the trades the pitch was built on.