Two weeks after selling most of its public portfolio, Aschenbrenner's fund put $400 million into a chip startup almost nobody has heard of
Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund founded in 2024 by the former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has invested a further $400 million in Source Foundry, taking its total stake in the startup to $500 million and valuing the company at about $5 billion. Source Foundry, founded by the Stanford alumni Abdulmalik Obaid and Joe Burg, does not make chips. It works upstream of the fab, on the tooling and manufacturing processes that produce semiconductors, with the aim of making that step faster and cheaper — which is why coverage has framed it as taking aim at ASML's position rather than at TSMC's. The timing is what makes this notable. Aschenbrenner started the fund in his mid-twenties with no trading experience, posted strong early returns, and was then caught by the decline in AI infrastructure stocks. At the end of July the fund sold most of its public portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel, keeping its Anthropic shares; assets under management are reported to have fallen from roughly $20 billion to $10 billion. Having halved, it has now committed a large private cheque to a company whose product almost nobody outside the industry can evaluate.
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