AI-related stocks plummet; 'stock gurus' Leopold and Serenity suffer major losses

ME AI updates: Recently, AI trading has experienced a sharp cooldown, with high-beta assets—from U.S. equities to Asian tech stocks—facing collective pressure. The Nasdaq 100 has clearly retreated from its highs, and numerous stocks in AI infrastructure, cloud computing, power, and semiconductor chains have posted double-digit declines. The Korean KOSPI has even become an amplifier for this sell-off, retreating nearly 40% since its mid-June peak, with intraday losses briefly nearing 44%. The AI compute chain, previously favored by capital inflows, is now undergoing rapid deleveraging and valuation reassessment. Under these conditions, even the once-celebrated "stock gods" have failed to shield themselves from the downturn. Situational Awareness, an AI-themed hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, is seeking new capital injections. After recent sharp corrections in AI-related stocks, this fund—known for its highly concentrated bets on the AI supply chain—has incurred significant losses and is supplementing capital through investor communications and potential asset sales. This fundraising effort has quickly become a defining event following the retreat in AI trading. Over the past year, markets were willing to pay premium valuations for compute, chips, power, and cloud infrastructure. But with sharp volatility in the KOSPI, Nasdaq 100, and multiple AI infrastructure stocks, capital is now reevaluating the return cycles, leverage risks, and overcrowding within the AI supply chain. A similar pullback has also hit Serenity, the so-called "white-haired stock god" familiar to Chinese investors. Serenity is an anonymous trader active on X, with no regulatory filings disclosing full positions; outsiders cannot verify his actual holdings or portfolio weights. However, he has repeatedly publicly discussed his AI supply chain framework, emphasizing concentrations in storage, photonics, robotics, and upstream semiconductors—the so-called "AI bottlenecks." Serenity’s rise to fame stemmed from his early identification of highly elastic assets deep within the supply chain. He previously highlighted names such as SIVE, NBIS, AXTI, and CCXI, covering niche segments like CPO light sources, InP materials, AI cloud services, and humanoid robotics. During favorable market conditions, these stocks exhibited far greater upside potential than mainstream tech stocks, rapidly elevating Serenity to cult status on social media. Yet the backlash from such high-elasticity assets has been equally severe. In mid-July, Serenity stated on X that his portfolio suffered a maximum drawdown of 49.4% this month following the recent market crash. He later explained that with 1.4x leverage and an average decline of approximately 35% in his heavily weighted storage and photonics holdings, a 49% drawdown was not unexpected. (Source: BlockBeats)