A hedge fund founded by a former OpenAI researcher is positioning itself as a cornerstone investor in what could become one of the largest foreign-company listings in US history. Situational Awareness LP, run by Leopold Aschenbrenner, plans to be a major backer of SK Hynix’s upcoming Nasdaq ADR offering, which targets up to approximately $29.4 billion in proceeds.
The deal and the players
SK Hynix announced plans for its Nasdaq ADR listing on June 24, with trading expected to begin around July 10. The South Korean memory chip giant is a critical supplier to Nvidia, producing the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power the GPUs running everything from ChatGPT to crypto mining operations.
Situational Awareness LP, alongside Baillie Gifford and Coatue, has indicated interest in purchasing up to a combined $7 billion in the new ADRs. SK Hynix already constitutes around 6.5% of Situational Awareness LP’s disclosed portfolio. The fund, which launched in late 2024 with an initial equity exposure of roughly $225 million, has ballooned to approximately $13.7 billion in assets.
Aschenbrenner left OpenAI and published a viral essay on the trajectory toward artificial general intelligence that essentially served as the thesis document for his fund. The entire strategy revolves around public equities that benefit from AGI and AI infrastructure buildout.
