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The AI-focused hedge fund has now committed $500 million to Source Foundry, a Stanford-founded startup aiming to challenge ASML in chip manufacturing equipment
Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund run by Leopold Aschenbrenner, invested $400 million earlier this week in Source Foundry, a private startup aiming to upend how chips are manufactured, according to The Wall Street Journal. The investment brings Situational Awareness's total stake in Source Foundry to $500 million.
Source Foundry was founded by Stanford University researchers Abdulmalik Obaid and Joe Burg. The startup has raised at least several hundred million dollars to date and was valued at $5 billion in a recent fundraising round, according to the Journal. Sequoia Capital previously backed the company.
Source Foundry's ambition is to build the next generation of machinery, tooling, and software for AI chip fabrication, taking direct aim at Dutch giant ASML $ASML Holding, the dominant supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography systems that underpin advanced semiconductor production. ASML's machines can cost more than $400 million each. "If you trace the AI supply chain upstream, from models to chips to the machines that manufacture them, each layer becomes increasingly critical and constrained," Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan said in a statement. "Source Foundry tackles the tightest bottleneck: tooling for semiconductor manufacturing, starting in lithography."
