Ex-OpenAI's Aschenbrenner Bet $5.5B on AI Chips. Now He's Betting $8.5B Against Them 💸
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI hedge fund Situational Awareness went from pure AI long to 62% short semiconductors in one quarter. Here's what changed and why the thesis still holds.
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Three weeks ago, I published a deep dive on Leopold Aschenbrenner and Situational Awareness LP, the $225M-to-$5.5B AGI-infrastructure hedge fund that quietly became the most intellectually coherent portfolio in public markets. The thesis, in one line, is this: buy the bottlenecks of the AGI buildout, short what AI eats.
Power, compute, memory, optics, fabs on the long side. Legacy IT services on the short side. Simple, sequenced, almost monastic.
In fact, it’s the same split Coatue’s May 2026 report frames as sellers of scarcity vs buyers of scarcity, and the two theses validate each other almost line for line.
Then, earlier this week, the latest 13F dropped. And the book broke its own template.
Gross notional jumped from $5.52 billion to $13.68 billion, a 148% expansion in 90 days. The book went from 29 to 37 disclosed positions across 29 distinct tickers (eight names are now held on both sides simultaneously).
But the headline isn’t the size. It’s the shape.
For the first time in the fund’s history, the disclosed book is net short: 38.1% long, 61.9% short. The short side is a wall of single-name puts on every Tier-1 name in the semiconductor stack: NVDA, AVGO, AMD, MU, TSM, ASML, INTC. Plus ORCL puts. Plus, SMH ETF puts back in size as the largest position in the book at 14.94%.
An important caveat before we go further: 13F filings disclose put and call notional but do not specify whether the fund is long or short those options. The near-universal read of this filing, and the one that fits the fund’s prior pattern of using puts as directional shorts, is that these are bought puts expressing a bearish view. That interpretation is what follows. But directional intent cannot be confirmed from the filing alone.
YTD return on the disclosed positions: +39.45%. SPY: +8.40%. That’s 31 percentage points of alpha in just 4.5 months 🤯
You can watch the whole book live on the Situational Awareness tracker, direction-corrected for P&L, bucket exposure, and the full overlay structure. It updates with every filing.
→ So does this break the thesis? No.
→ Does it change everything about how to express it? Yes.
And anyone running an AI-infrastructure book, building in the space, or trying to figure out what to do with the semis they bought in 2024 needs to update their priors immediately.
Let’s walk through it all.