Situational Awareness Sold Portfolio to Citadel After $5.7 Billion Sandisk Bet Helped Trigger AI Rout Losses
Updated
Updated · CNBC · Aug 14
Situational Awareness Sold Portfolio to Citadel After $5.7 Billion Sandisk Bet Helped Trigger AI Rout Losses
3 articles · Updated · CNBC · Aug 14
Summary
$45 billion hedge fund Situational Awareness was forced to sell much of its public-equity portfolio to Citadel after July's AI-stock reversal pushed it into a liquidity crunch.
A Friday 13F shows the fund entered the selloff heavily concentrated in AI infrastructure names, with top June holdings including $5.7 billion of Sandisk, $5.6 billion of Micron and $745 million of CoreWeave.
Those bets were hit hard in July: Sandisk fell nearly 47%, Micron 29%, Bloom Energy 32%, Taiwan Semiconductor 15% and Nebius 31%, while the filing shows Leopold Aschenbrenner had been adding to several positions.
Leverage and losses elsewhere in the portfolio worsened the damage, and by July 30 the fund had offloaded leveraged stock bets to Ken Griffin's Citadel at a discount, shrinking holdings to about $10 billion.
The collapse marked a sharp reversal for a strategy that had gained more than 1,000% since inception by backing AI hardware and infrastructure while shorting software companies seen as exposed to disruption.