AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner invests $400 million in chip startup Source Foundry

Huo Xing Finance reports that on August 8, according to Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter, 25-year-old Wall Street rising AI investing prodigy and former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner has returned to the investment scene, deploying $400 million to support a private company backed by Sequoia Capital, just days after his hedge fund neared collapse. The private company, newly disclosed today, is chip manufacturing startup Source Foundry. The fund had previously invested $100 million in Source Foundry; with this additional $400 million, its total investment in the company now reaches $500 million. This investment, completed on Tuesday, marks the first sign of how Aschenbrenner is recovering after his Situational Awareness fund nearly collapsed last week due to margin calls from multiple Wall Street lenders. Source Foundry is a secretive chip manufacturing startup founded in San Francisco in 2025 by Stanford materials scientist Abdulmalik Obaid (CEO) and Joe Burg. The company focuses on developing simpler, lower-cost, and faster semiconductor lithography and manufacturing processes and tools, aiming to challenge ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines and bridge the vast gap between the exponential growth in AI computing demand and the linear expansion of traditional chip production capacity, thereby reshaping the production of advanced AI chips.