When a hedge fund goes from zero to $45 billion in assets under management in under two years, the story has exactly two possible endings. On July 30, 2026, Situational Awareness LP found out which one it got.
Citadel Securities paid $10 billion to acquire the public equity holdings of Situational Awareness LP, the AI-focused hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. The deal hands Ken Griffin’s firm a portfolio built almost entirely around AI infrastructure bets, at a moment when those bets have gone badly wrong.
How a $45B fund ended up in a fire sale
Situational Awareness launched in 2024 and was backed by high-profile tech investors including the Collison brothers and Nat Friedman. The fund assembled a concentrated portfolio of AI infrastructure plays: data centers, power supply companies, semiconductors, and Bitcoin miners pivoting toward high-performance computing.
At its peak, the fund’s assets under management reached nearly $45 billion. Shortly before the sale, that figure had compressed to over $20 billion. The publicly traded portion of the portfolio, valued somewhere between $10 billion and $16 billion at the time of the transaction, sat at the center of the problem. Situational Awareness had financed a significant chunk of its positions with leverage. When AI-related equities turned south in mid-2026, margin calls started arriving, and the fund needed liquidity fast.
