Leopold Aschenbrenner’s embattled AI hedge fund is still writing big checks. The new money, reported by The Wall Street Journal, pushes Situational Awareness’s stake in Source Foundry, a Stanford-founded chip startup, to The Wall Street Journal. That brings the fund’s total stake in the company to $500M.
Source Foundry is working on making semiconductor manufacturing faster and cheaper, an area that has drawn a wave of deep-pocketed backers as the AI buildout strains chip supply. The startup has stayed largely under the radar despite the size of the investment.
The fresh bet comes after a rough stretch for Situational Awareness, which Aschenbrenner launched in 2024 as a former OpenAI researcher with no trading background. A slide in AI infrastructure shares hammered the fund’s returns, and late last month it unloaded the bulk of its public holdings to Ken Griffin’s Citadel while holding on to its Anthropic shares. Its assets under management are said to have fallen by half, from roughly $20B to $10B.
Despite the turmoil, Aschenbrenner has kept up a series of private-market wagers, and Source Foundry is his biggest by far. The fund has not commented on the deal. For a startup trying to rework the economics of chip production, the capital arrives at a moment when foundry capacity and advanced packaging are the industry’s tightest bottlenecks.
