Situational Awareness Reloads $400M Days After 78% Drawdown Hit Its $1.1B Miner Book
The Aschenbrenner-founded fund nearly collapsed on AI-stock margin calls, sold its public book to Citadel, then redeployed $400M into a private bet.
Situational Awareness, the hedge fund built by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has put $400 million into an undisclosed private company just days after a leveraged unwind nearly wiped out the fund, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The move stacks on top of a $100 million stake the fund took in the same company back in July, bringing its combined exposure to that single position to $500 million in roughly a month.
For traders tracking crossover risk between AI equities and crypto-adjacent names, the sequence is notable: assets at Situational Awareness fell approximately 78% in July after an AI-stock sell-off triggered margin calls from its Wall Street prime brokers. According to the Financial Times, the fund scrambled for fresh capital and weighed offloading stakes in private holdings before instead selling most of its public equity book to Ken Griffin’s Citadel, using the proceeds to repay lenders while keeping its private positions intact.
A $1.11B bet on Bitcoin miners as AI infrastructure
The drawdown matters to this audience because of where Situational Awareness had concentrated risk. A May 18 SEC filing covering positions as of March 31 showed the fund held roughly $1.11 billion spread across seven Bitcoin mining equities, including IREN, Core Scientific, Riot Platforms and CleanSpark — all names that have pivoted mining capacity toward AI compute and power infrastructure over the past two years.
That thesis — treating Bitcoin miners as leveraged proxies for AI-driven power and data-center demand — has been one of the more crowded trades linking crypto-mining balance sheets to the broader AI capex cycle. A fund forced into a 78% drawdown on the back of that exact correlation is a live data point for anyone modeling how correlated miner stocks have become with Nasdaq-style AI beta, rather than with spot BTC price action alone.
Citadel absorbs the public book, private bets stay on
The decision to hand the public equity portfolio to Citadel rather than liquidate private stakes suggests Situational Awareness prioritized preserving its illiquid, higher-conviction positions over its more liquid, and presumably more correlated, public holdings — which would include the Bitcoin-mining stock basket disclosed in the May filing. Whether that basket survived the transfer intact, or was part of what was sold to Citadel, has not been disclosed.
What is confirmed is that the fund found the balance sheet room within days to write a $400 million check into a private company it had already backed with $100 million a month earlier — a pace of redeployment that signals lenders were repaid and margin pressure has eased, at least for now. Cointelegraph reported it had approached Situational Awareness for comment; no response had been disclosed as of the report.
Why it matters for miner-stock positioning
For desks running long exposure to Bitcoin-mining equities as an AI-infrastructure hedge, the episode is a reminder that a single macro shock in AI-linked stocks can force forced-selling cascades through funds holding both AI and mining names side by side. With IREN, Core Scientific, Riot Platforms and CleanSpark all named in the fund’s last disclosed 13F, any further deleveraging — or reloading, as just happened — is worth watching as a proxy for institutional sentiment on the miner-AI convergence trade.
Read more: Hayes Ties Bitcoin’s Path to $1M to an AI-CAPEX Credit Unwind, BTC Near $64.4K