SITUATION ANALYSIS: Situational Awareness explained Leopold Aschenbrenner’s fund, Situational Awareness, files 13F this morning. Reported notional value $13.7B, an increase of 148% from $5.52B last quarter. Puts: The AI hardware/capex complex: VanEck Semiconductor Sector ($SMH), NVIDIA ($NVDA), Oracle ($ORCL), Broadcom ($AVGO), $AMD Long on: Power/fuel cells (Bloom Energy, $879M + $55M calls = $934M), memory (SanDisk, $724M stock + $389M calls = $1.1B total), AI cloud (Coreweave, $556M stock + $141M calls = $697M), crypto mining/data centers (CleanSpark, IREN, Applied Digital, Riot, CORZ, etc.) Straddles: Both puts and calls on two of the same names: - Micron ($MU): 4.27% put + 3.09% call - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing ($TSM): 3.91% put + 2.59% call Inflow: 32% of this quarter’s AUM growth came from new LP inflows. Exited completely: Lumentum Holdings (optical communications), Coherent (also optical), EQT Corp (natural gas), Cipher Mining (secondary miners), Tower Semiconductor (specialty chips). Takeaways: Leopold has broken the future down along two timelines: 1. In the short term, this is a volatility-aware hedge. Over 60% of the fund’s reported notional is now in puts on AI hardware: crash insurance for a crowded market where export controls, Taiwan risk, China, and a tight supply-demand imbalance can all force sharp repricing. 2. But in the long term, this is an optimistic, future-facing bet on the layer beneath the GPUs: the power that they run on, the cooling that they rely on, and the land that they’re built upon. Compute is currently the scarce resource that everyone’s focused on, but this is where they’re betting that the next bottleneck is most likely to arise. Note: 13Fs report options as notional exposure, not market value. Without knowing how sensitive the puts are to moves in the underlying asset, a position that looks like a massive short may be a much smaller hedge.