The Situational Awareness hedge fund, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, urgently sold a significant part of its portfolio of public shares on July 30. The buyer was Citadel, managed by Ken Griffin, which agreed to purchase the package at a discount, ahead of competing offers from Millennium Management and Jane Street (both studied assets, but did not participate in the final transaction). The organizers of the transaction were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. According to the Financial Times, Situational Awareness's public investments were estimated at about $16 billion before the deal, making this operation one of the largest on the American stock market. The deal itself was prepared in less than a day: discussions began on Wednesday evening, and by Thursday morning the parties had agreed on the terms.

The reason for the emergency sale was a drop in the value of collateral amid a sharp decline in quotations in the technology sector. The fund actively used borrowed funds, and when its investments in AI infrastructure - shares of Nebius Group, Sandisk, Micron and CoreWeave – fell by more than 35% by the end of July, prime brokers (Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase) demanded an increase in collateral. An additional blow was dealt by a bid to lower the shares of software development companies, including Adobe, as well as the fall of other major positions - SK Hynix and Bloom Energy. By the end of July, the loss of the fund, according to The Wall Street Journal, reached about 67%.
The scale of losses looks especially dramatic against the background of the previous record profitability. In a letter to investors dated July 24, Aschenbrenner said that in January-June, the fund earned 439%, and since its launch – 1551%. In the same appeal, he invited clients to deposit additional funds from August 1, describing the sale in the tech sector as a good moment for purchases. Estimates of the size of Situational Awareness at its peak vary: CNBC sources called $45 billion in early July, Bloomberg and the Financial Times – the range of $ 20-24 billion before the main collapse.

Despite the fund's large-scale exit from positions, shares of bitcoin miners, which Situational Awareness held according to reports on March 31, showed steady growth at the end of trading on July 30: IRENUS rose by 30.54% (to $38.26), Bitdeer – by 24.72%, Riot Platforms – by 21.27%, CleanSpark – by 21.07%, Core Scientific – by 20.36%, HIVE Digital – by 18.34%. An additional driver for IREN was its own news: on July 20, the company announced the conclusion of contracts for cloud AI services with a total value of $2.8 billion and raised the target annual revenue rate of AI Cloud by the end of 2026 to more than $4 billion, naming Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, Figure AI and other organizations among its customers.
Situational Awareness's main non-public investments, including a stake in artificial intelligence developer Anthropic, were not included in the agreement with Citadel. At the same time, the fund's management had previously almost agreed to sell this package for about $3.5 billion to a consortium led by Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, but the deal was canceled. A representative of Situational Awareness told CNBC that reports of the sale of a stake in Anthropic are inaccurate.

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The material has been prepared solely for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or recommendation.