Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness makes $400M private bet

Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness makes $400M private bet

Thu, August 6, 2026 at 4:44 PM GMT+3 2 min read

Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund, Situational Awareness, has made a $400 million investment in an undisclosed privately held company, according to Bloomberg. The investment closed Tuesday, just days after the fund narrowly avoided collapse when lenders began issuing margin calls.

The new investment adds to a $100 million stake Situational Awareness had taken in the company the prior month, Bloomberg reported, citing people who requested anonymity. The identity of the company was not disclosed.

The move is the first sign of how Leopold Aschenbrenner intends to rebuild after his fund was pushed to the brink last week, when a rapid decline in its public technology holdings triggered escalating collateral demands from banks across Wall Street. While scrambling to raise the necessary cash, he weighed offloading some of the fund's positions in private companies.

He eventually reached an agreement with Ken Griffin's Citadel to divest most of the fund's publicly traded holdings, a transaction that freed him to settle his debts with lenders while preserving the fund's private investments. When the turmoil subsided, the fund's total assets had dropped to around $10 billion, down from $45 billion at the beginning of July.

Situational Awareness had used as much as 400% leverage and built its public portfolio around bets on AI infrastructure companies — among them SK Hynix and CoreWeave — that lost value sharply this month. Bearish wagers on software companies also went against the fund. Its top disclosed positions, including Nebius Group, Sandisk, Micron, and CoreWeave, each shed more than 35% of their value. Before this month's decline, the fund had posted gains of more than 1,000% since its inception in July 2024, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In a letter to investors on Friday, Leopold Aschenbrenner said the fund took the steps needed to survive and pledged to draw lessons from the experience. "I will make it my mission to ensure that we learn the necessary lessons from this experience," he wrote. He added that he is personally invested alongside his backers, with the bulk of his own capital in the fund, and has agreed to hold one-on-one calls with any investors who want to speak with him this week.

Investors in Situational Awareness include Greenoaks founder Neil Mehta, the foundation of XN founder Gaurav Kapadia, Tiger Global Management's former head of public equities Feroz Dewan, and D1 Capital Partners founder Dan Sundheim, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A representative for Situational Awareness declined to comment.