Ken Griffin’s Citadel just became the buyer of last resort for one of the most high-profile AI fund blowups in recent memory. On July 30, the $71B hedge fund completed its acquisition of the public equity portfolio from Situational Awareness LP, the AI-focused fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner in late 2024.
The deal transferred roughly $5.5B in equity positions, carved out of a portfolio that once sat atop a staggering 439% net return through June 30. Situational Awareness retained approximately $10B in remaining assets post-sale, including its private equity stakes in companies like Anthropic.
From 439% returns to forced selling
Situational Awareness LP rode a concentrated bet on AI infrastructure stocks to eye-popping returns, with peak assets under management estimated between $20B and $45B. Mounting margin pressures forced aggressive deleveraging.
The portfolio that changed hands included substantial positions in Broadcom, Intel, CoreWeave, and SK Hynix, all names deeply embedded in the AI compute supply chain.
The crypto angle hiding inside an AI deal
Buried within the equity slice was approximately $1B in Bitcoin mining stocks. Companies like CoreWeave started as crypto mining operations before pivoting to AI cloud services. GPU demand, data center capacity, and power consumption are shared bottlenecks across both industries.
When a $5.5B equity portfolio gets liquidated and a billion of it is in mining stocks, that creates real price pressure on names that crypto investors follow closely. The fact that Citadel absorbed these positions rather than letting them hit the open market likely prevented a messier selloff in the mining sector.
What Citadel’s move signals for markets
Citadel managing approximately $71B in total AUM means this acquisition represents a meaningful but not reckless allocation.
Situational Awareness retaining its Anthropic stake and other private equity positions is worth noting. Only the public equity positions changed hands, meaning the private side of the AI market remains untested by this transaction.