Situational Awareness LP reveals the cost of leverage after 1000% returns

There is a version of this story where Situational Awareness LP (SALP) is simply the greatest hedge fund launch in recent memory. Started in 2024 by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who became something of a cult figure in AI-obsessive circles, the fund grew from $225 million in seed capital to over $20 billion in assets under management. Returns topped 1,000% since inception. At peak, assets neared $45 billion. The rise: concentrated bets on an AI supercycle SALP’s thesis was straightforward, if audacious: the AI infrastructure buildout is the defining investment opportunity of the decade, and most institutional capital is too cautious to size into it properly. The fund acted accordingly. It built concentrated positions across AI infrastructure, with a public equity portfolio that included Bitcoin miners Riot Platforms and CleanSpark, Bloom Energy, and semiconductor-adjacent names like SK Hynix. By May 2026, SALP had posted a year-to-date return of approximately 270%. For the first half of 2026, net returns reached 439%. Backers were not exactly a random sample of the investing public. The Collison brothers, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, and Jane Street were among S...