After only a month of huge losses, the hedge fund Situational Awareness buys bullish options and bets on AI-related industry chain companies such as SNDK.US (SNDK.US)

The Zhitong Finance App learned that the hedge fund Situational Awareness, which suffered huge losses and almost collapsed at the end of July due to heavy AI positions and high leverage, is returning to the market. According to people familiar with the matter, this AI-themed fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner recently bought bullish options once again, betting on AI and related industry chain companies such as American Ultra Micro (AMD.US), Bloom Energy (BE.US), CoreWeave (CRWV.US), SK Hynix (SKHY.US), and SanDisk (SNDK.US).

According to reports, these deals mainly occurred last week and the beginning of this week. Reporter David Faber said that Aschenbrenner has bought an option position worth “hundreds of millions of dollars in premium” this time, and the scale is quite impressive. Faber said, “It looks like he's returning to a deal that once brought huge profits and came to an abrupt end until it broke out in July.”

This means that after undergoing large-scale deleveraging and open market stock position clean-up at the end of July, Situational Awareness restarted taking risks in just over a month, and the choice was still the AI transaction it is most familiar with.

Compared to directly rebuying a large number of stocks, this time Situational Awareness mainly establishes exposure through call options. Its latest bet covers various AI industry chains such as AI chips, data center infrastructure, electricity, and storage. Among them, AMD is an important player in the AI chip field, and CoreWeave is an AI cloud computing infrastructure company. Bloom Energy is benefiting from the increase in data center power demand, while SK Hynix and SanDisk are involved in AI storage and related industry chains, respectively.

Situational awareness previously relied on aggressive bets on the AI industry chain to achieve amazing returns. According to an investor letter checked by the media, the fund's return rate from the beginning of this year to the end of June once reached 439%.

The asset size of this fund, which has only been in existence for about two years, has rapidly expanded. According to reports, at one point, its assets under management exceeded 20 billion US dollars. Aschenbrenner himself became famous in Silicon Valley by publishing the article “Situational Awareness” in 2024. In the article, he predicted that artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on the economy and society.

However, behind high returns comes extremely high risk. Situational awareness previously used a large amount of leverage to amplify AI transaction returns, while its holdings were highly concentrated on semiconductors and other AI-related assets. When technology stocks were violently sold off at the end of July, the fund's positions quickly came under pressure and eventually fell into a liquidity crisis.

Situational Awareness was then forced to drastically cut its open market portfolio and sell more than $4 billion in stock positions to Ken Griffin's Castle Investments. This group of assets mainly involves AI and semiconductor companies. Castle Investments has rapidly reduced its exposure to related risks since then, while Situational Awareness has retained some private market assets, including Anthropic shares, and a small number of open market positions.

Despite experiencing this severe shock, Situational Awareness has not withdrawn from the market. Aschenbrenner told investors earlier this month that after experiencing a sharp retracement in July, the fund has achieved positive returns of around 80% since this year.

The massive repurchase of call options now indicates that Aschenbrenner is rapidly resuming his risk bets on the open market. Notably, this is not an exploratory small-scale return. According to reports, its investment in option premiums has reached hundreds of millions of dollars, which means that the AI-related risk exposure re-established by Situational Awareness may be quite impressive.