Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness has returned to U.S. public markets through a concentrated slate of long-dated call options on AI infrastructure companies, marking a more tightly risk-defined re-entry after the fund’s leveraged equity positions were liquidated during a July downturn.
The new trades, reported in early September, span chipmakers, memory suppliers, data-center operators and power infrastructure companies. CNBC, citing people familiar with the activity, identified Situational Awareness as the buyer of options linked to Advanced Micro Devices, Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, SK Hynix, SanDisk and the DRAM exchange-traded fund.
The positioning retains the fund’s earlier conviction in the physical supply chain behind artificial intelligence computing. Yet the structure has changed sharply. Rather than rebuilding a portfolio mainly through borrowed-money stock purchases, the fund is using calls for which the premium is paid upfront, according to the Financial Times. That approach places the maximum loss on each contract at the initial premium, although the entire premium can be lost if the trades expire without value.
Large flex call purchases target AI supply chain
Market attention first focused on a cluster of unusually large FLEX options trades, a customized form of listed option that allows participants to set terms such as strike price and expiration. Paradis, a U.S. equities analyst, wrote that the group had paid about $315 million in aggregate premium since the previous Friday.
Paradis estimated that the options carried roughly $1.1 billion of delta exposure, a measure of how much an option’s value is expected to move with the underlying shares, and approximately $5.8 million of vega exposure, which measures sensitivity to changes in implied volatility.
The largest reported trade was in SanDisk. Paradis listed January-expiry calls with 2040 and 2200 strikes at $57 million in premium, $198 million in delta exposure and $1.04 million in vega. The strikingly high strike levels suggest a buyer positioned for exceptionally large upside rather than incremental gains in the storage company’s shares.
Bloom Energy calls with January expiry and 250 and 310 strikes accounted for $48 million in premium, $140 million in delta and $565,000 in vega, according to Paradis. Bloom’s inclusion extends the trade beyond semiconductors and memory into power generation, an area increasingly tied to the electricity demands of large-scale data centers.
Intel January 105/115 calls were reported at $48 million in premium and $185 million in delta, while CoreWeave calls at the same strikes carried $43 million in premium and $160 million in delta. The combination links a legacy semiconductor manufacturer with a cloud-computing provider built around AI infrastructure.
Paradis also identified calls on a DRAM-focused ETF, SK Hynix and AMD. The DRAM ETF’s January 65/70 calls involved $43 million in premium, while SK Hynix’s January 190/210 calls involved $39 million. AMD’s January 540/580 calls required $36 million in premium but carried the group’s highest reported delta exposure, at $193 million, and $1.08 million of vega.
Paradis wrote that trading desks at Nomura and Goldman Sachs believed the orders came from one buyer. CNBC subsequently reported that Situational Awareness had been active in the same names during the previous week and the early part of the current week.
A rebuild after July liquidation
The options activity follows a swift reversal for a fund that had accumulated an unusually large public-markets footprint. Situational Awareness disclosed $225 million in public positions in the fourth quarter of 2024, rising to $5.5 billion in its fourth-quarter 2025 disclosure and then $13.7 billion in its first-quarter 2025 filing, according to the supplied filings. Its latest second-quarter 2025 report listed total notional exposure of $20.2 billion.
The July pullback in AI-related stocks exposed the vulnerability of that expansion. Situational Awareness was forced to deleverage and liquidate public-market positions after the sector decline collided with high leverage. Most of the fund’s stock portfolio was sold to Citadel in a discounted bulk transaction, according to the supplied account.
The Financial Times reported on September 11 that the fund had begun rebuilding its public-market portfolio and had started working with Clear Street. Aschenbrenner told the broker that leverage would be “materially below” the level used before the July unwind, the newspaper reported.
That commitment helps explain why the latest activity has appeared in fully funded calls rather than a similarly sized leveraged equity book. A buyer of calls can obtain exposure to a rise in a share price without financing the full value of the underlying shares. The trade-off is time: calls lose value as expiration approaches and can suffer even when the underlying stock rises if the gain is too small or volatility declines.
Lending relationship changes after unwind
The fund’s financing options also appear to have narrowed. Reuters reported on September 11, citing people familiar with the matter, that JPMorgan had ended its lending relationship with Situational Awareness. The bank had previously been one of the fund’s principal lenders, Reuters said.
The move toward paid-for options therefore serves both a portfolio and financing purpose. It allows Situational Awareness to return to its preferred AI theme while reducing exposure to margin calls that can force sales during a market decline. It does not remove risk: a concentrated options book can lose substantial value quickly, particularly when contracts are far out of the money or depend on sustained volatility.
The selected names show that Aschenbrenner’s thesis remains focused on the bottlenecks created by AI buildouts. AMD and Intel offer processor exposure; SanDisk, SK Hynix and the DRAM ETF target memory and storage; CoreWeave represents AI cloud capacity; and Bloom Energy offers a route into the power needs associated with expanding data-center fleets.
The re-entry also places more weight on a narrow set of corporate and sector outcomes. The calls would benefit from sharp advances in the underlying shares before their January expiries, but their value remains sensitive to option pricing and market expectations. After July’s forced unwind, Situational Awareness is seeking the upside of the AI infrastructure trade with losses defined contract by contract rather than by a leveraged balance sheet.
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