Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, invested $400 million more in chip startup Source Foundry, TechCrunch reported and Yahoo Finance confirmed.
The deal brings the fund's total investment in Source Foundry to $500 million. Source Foundry, founded by Stanford researchers, is building tools aimed at making chip fabrication faster and cheaper, according to both outlets.
The investment follows a rough stretch for the fund. Situational Awareness sold most of its public stock portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel in July as AI infrastructure stocks declined, and its assets under management fell to $10 billion from $20 billion, TechCrunch reported. The fund kept its Anthropic shares.
Aschenbrenner launched Situational Awareness in 2024 with no prior trading experience, and the fund's early returns were reportedly strong before its recent losses, according to Yahoo Finance.
For builders, a hedge fund doubling down on chip-manufacturing tooling while pulling out of public AI stocks is a bet that fabrication capacity, not model weights, is where AI supply chain money moves next. Startups building novel chip-fabrication tools now have one more backer willing to write a check even as public AI infrastructure valuations wobble.