BlockBeats News, July 30th. According to the Financial Times, Situational Awareness, the AI-themed hedge fund founded by 25-year-old Wall Street's rising AI stock god and former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, is seeking new capital injection. Following a recent sharp pullback in AI-related stocks, this fund known for its high concentration bets on the AI industry chain has suffered significant losses and is now looking to replenish capital through investor communication and potential asset sales.

Situational Awareness was established in 2024, with the investment logic based on Aschenbrenner's belief in the imminent arrival of AGI. At one point, the fund reached a size of about $20 billion, achieving a net return of up to 439% as of June 2026, making it one of the most prominent star funds in this AI bull market. Its holdings include companies such as Oracle, AMD, Nebius, and Sharon AI in the AI infrastructure and computing power chain, and it uses leverage to amplify positions.

However, AI trading has recently cooled rapidly, with South Korea's KOSPI, the Nasdaq 100, and several AI infrastructure stocks experiencing significant volatility, dragging Situational Awareness into the retreat. Reports indicate that in recent investor communications, Aschenbrenner acknowledged the increased market turbulence, describing it as a new investment opportunity and encouraging investors to inject new funds by August 1st.

This fundraising has also become a landmark event following the downturn in AI capital expenditure trading. Over the past year, the market has been willing to pay high valuations for computing power, chips, electricity, and cloud infrastructure; as the tech stocks retreat deepens, funds have begun to reassess the return cycle, leverage risks, and concentration risks of the AI industry chain. Situational Awareness still bets on the long-term trend of AI, including potential opportunities such as the Anthropic IPO, but in the short term, the market's tolerance for high-volatility AI assets has significantly decreased.

It is worth noting that Situational Awareness has previously disclosed a large number of put options in its 13F filings. Its first-quarter holdings show that the fund holds PUT positions for large semiconductor and AI chain targets such as SMH, Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom, AMD, TSMC, and Micron, with a substantial nominal exposure. This structure was once interpreted by the market as a relative value trade of "bullish on AI infrastructure while hedging the pullback in large chip stocks."

However, holding put options does not mean the fund can completely avoid losses. The 13F filings disclose the nominal scale of options corresponding to the underlying assets, without revealing the premium, strike price, expiration date, and Delta, so the actual level of protection may be much lower than the surface numbers. Additionally, the 13F is only a snapshot of holdings as of March 31st, and by the time of the significant AI stock pullback in July, the related puts may have been closed out, rolled over, or reduced, making it impossible for external investors to assess the current hedging status based solely on a quarterly report.

More importantly, the fund's previous long positions were heavily concentrated in a group of high-volatility AI infrastructure stocks. These include targets such as Bloom Energy, SanDisk, CoreWeave, IREN, Core Scientific, Applied Digital, Riot, CleanSpark, and others, with the core logic linked to AI data centers, power, storage, GPU cloud, and mining firm transformation efforts. These stocks demonstrate strong resilience during the AI capital expenditure upcycle, but once the market begins to question AI investment returns, financing environment, and customer demand, their decline often exceeds that of traditional large-cap chip stocks.