Via theminermag.com
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI hedge fund went from a standing start to $20 billion in assets, then learned an old lesson the hard way.
There is a version of this story where Situational Awareness LP (SALP) is simply the greatest hedge fund launch in recent memory. Started in 2024 by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who became something of a cult figure in AI-obsessive circles, the fund grew from $225 million in seed capital to over $20 billion in assets under management. Returns topped 1,000% since inception. At peak, assets neared $45 billion.
The rise: concentrated bets on an AI supercycle #
SALP’s thesis was straightforward, if audacious: the AI infrastructure buildout is the defining investment opportunity of the decade, and most institutional capital is too cautious to size into it properly.
The fund acted accordingly. It built concentrated positions across AI infrastructure, with a public equity portfolio that included Bitcoin miners Riot Platforms and CleanSpark, Bloom Energy, and semiconductor-adjacent names like SK Hynix. By May 2026, SALP had posted a year-to-date return of approximately 270%. For the first half of 2026, net returns reached 439%.
Backers were not exactly a random sample of the investing public. The Collison brothers, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, and Jane Street were among SALP’s supporters, lending the fund both capital and credibility at a moment when the AI trade was still considered a niche bet rather than consensus.
The fund also applied leverage, up to 4x, to amplify those concentrated positions.
The unwind: margin pressure and a single-buyer liquidation #
By late July 2026, AI stocks had hit a rough patch, and SALP’s leverage structure meant that rough patches had consequences far beyond what an unleveraged portfolio would face.
Losses in key positions, notably SK Hynix, combined with unfavorable moves in short positions including Adobe, created margin pressure that the fund could not absorb at scale.
Around July 30, 2026, SALP liquidated its entire public equity portfolio. The sale went to a single buyer, which itself signals something about the urgency of the transaction.
As of late 2025, regulatory filings had placed SALP’s AUM at approximately $9.3 billion, reflecting the volatility that had already started to work on the fund’s balance sheet before the July liquidation event.
What comes next #
SALP is not shutting down. Aschenbrenner has signaled a strategic pivot toward private investments, including a position in Anthropic, the AI safety company that has attracted multi-billion-dollar commitments from the likes of Amazon and Google. The fund is also reportedly seeking to raise additional capital.
For Bitcoin and crypto investors specifically, SALP’s portfolio overlap is notable. The fund held Bitcoin miners Riot Platforms and CleanSpark as part of its AI infrastructure thesis, since the same data center and power infrastructure that supports AI compute overlaps substantially with large-scale Bitcoin mining operations. A forced liquidation of those positions by a seller of SALP’s size creates real selling pressure in names that the crypto market already treats as high-beta proxies for Bitcoin itself. Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our