Aschenbrenner's $10B Fund Returns to AI Options After 78% Drawdown

For investors tracking high-beta AI positioning, a fund that lost roughly 78% of its assets returning to options in the same sector is a live risk signal. The re-entry matters less for any single ticker and more for what it says about leverage, conviction, and available capital after a forced unwind.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, the AI researcher whose hedge fund nearly collapsed in July, has returned to public-market trading through options. According to sources who spoke to CNBC's David Faber, his firm Situational Awareness bought options positions in Advanced Micro Devices, Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, SK Hynix, SanDisk, and the Roundhill Memory ETF during early September 2026 — late last week and early this week relative to a Sept. 11 report. The move is notable less because of any single ticker and more because it marks the fund's first visible re-entry after a dramatic forced deleveraging.

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A fund that peaked above $45 billion and fell to roughly $10 billion within weeks illustrates how quickly concentrated AI exposure can reverse.

The backstory is fresh enough that risk managers and AI-focused investors are unlikely to treat this as routine positioning. Situational Awareness saw assets peak above $45 billion in early July 2026, then suffered a rapid decline in leveraged AI-related stock positions. To stave off collapse, Aschenbrenner was forced to unwind public equity holdings to Ken Griffin's Citadel in a fire sale, leaving the fund with about $10 billion in assets. It retained stakes in private companies such as Anthropic. The new options activity comes with a significant open question: the sources did not say whether it is being funded with new investor capital or with assets left over after the July rout.

The selection of underlying names is a concentrated bet on the AI infrastructure supply chain. AMD competes directly with Nvidia in AI accelerators. CoreWeave is an AI-focused cloud-computing provider, itself a large buyer of GPUs. Bloom Energy supplies fuel-cell and power-generation equipment, positioning it around the data-center energy problem. SK Hynix and SanDisk span high-bandwidth memory and NAND storage, while the Roundhill Memory ETF is a broad bet on memory pricing. Even without knowing whether the positions are calls, puts, or spreads, the cluster is coherent: compute, power, memory, and storage.

Because the reporting does not specify option direction, the activity cannot be treated as unequivocally bullish. Options can express leveraged directional views, hedging, or volatility strategies. Still, for a fund that nearly died holding heavily leveraged AI equities, the return to options in the same thematic complex is a meaningful risk signal. It suggests Aschenbrenner, or whoever is managing the book, is trying to rebuild exposure to the AI trade while perhaps using options to cap downside or reduce the capital intensity of outright long positions. That would be a structural change from the leverage that caused the July collapse, but it is also possible the fund is simply trading with leftover capital and less room for error.