Key Takeaways:
Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness hedge fund is raising capital after a $1.11B bet on Bitcoin mining stocks triggered margin calls and a forced sale of its entire public equity portfolio to Citadel.
"The fund's mining exposure became a liquidity problem when AI-related stocks sold off in July, and leverage turned a manageable drawdown into a forced unwind," a person familiar with the fund's operations said.
The fund's March 31 13F filing showed 29 holdings worth $5.52B, with Bitcoin miners and their data center affiliates accounting for $1.38B — roughly 25% of the disclosed book. Core Scientific was the largest mining position at $418.7M, followed by IREN at $328.6M and Applied Digital at $278M. Other holdings included Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, Hut 8, Bitdeer, CleanSpark and Bitfarms. The fund had grown to about $45B by early July, according to CNBC, before the AI stock rout erased gains from a 439% first-half return.
The unwind does not mean Aschenbrenner's thesis on AI infrastructure is wrong — the fund still holds private investments including a stake in Anthropic, which filed confidential IPO paperwork in June. But the episode shows how leverage can collapse an investment horizon, forcing sales before a thesis has time to play out.
The Mining Bet That Broke the Fund
Aschenbrenner's pivot into Bitcoin miners was not random. His June 2024 essay series "Situational Awareness" argued that power, transformers and electricity supply — not chips — would be the bottleneck for AI development. Bitcoin miners own power contracts, land and cooling infrastructure, making them natural AI data center plays.
The fund's first 13F in December 2024 listed six holdings worth $254.8M, all power or chip companies with zero crypto exposure. By March 2025, miners represented a quarter of a portfolio that had grown 22 times in size.
When the AI stock selloff hit in July, the fund faced margin calls from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, according to CNBC. Citadel agreed to buy the bulk of the public equity book. Millennium Management and Jane Street passed on the deal, Bloomberg reported.
What Comes Next
Aschenbrenner told investors on July 24 that it was "a particularly good time to add funds," according to the Financial Times. He was right about the timing — Microsoft's strong earnings lifted chip stocks days later — but the fund no longer owned the public positions to benefit.
The capital raise suggests the fund intends to rebuild, though its ability to attract new money will depend on how investors view the leverage that caused the unwind. The private Anthropic stake, which could prove valuable if the AI company goes public, gives the fund a potential anchor asset.
For the Bitcoin mining sector, the episode exposes a risk that few investors had priced in: a single leveraged fund had become one of the largest shareholders in multiple mining companies, and its forced exit could weigh on those stocks until new buyers step in.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
