Citadel, Ken Griffin's hedge fund managing $71 billion, has acquired $5.5 billion worth of public AI-related stocks from Situational Awareness LP, a fund led by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. The transaction included about $1 billion in Bitcoin mining stocks, highlighting a rare crypto component within an AI-centric deal.
From Sky-High Returns to Forced Deleveraging
Situational Awareness LP, once commanding assets between $20 billion and $45 billion, generated an astonishing 439% net return by mid-2026 through aggressive bets on AI infrastructure companies. This run was driven by concentrated holdings in firms like Broadcom, Intel, CoreWeave, and SK Hynix, all critical players in AI compute supply chains. However, increasing margin calls pushed the fund towards a rapid deleveraging process, culminating in this partial portfolio sale.
Bitcoin Mining Stocks Under the AI Spotlight
What makes this deal particularly interesting to crypto watchers is the liquidation of $1 billion in Bitcoin mining equities embedded in the portfolio. Some companies, such as CoreWeave, originally focused on crypto mining before shifting their resources to AI cloud services, blending GPU demand, power consumption, and data center infrastructure challenges shared by both sectors. Citadel absorbing these mining positions likely prevented a sudden price drop that would have hit the crypto mining stocks hard.
Situational Awareness retains roughly $10 billion in assets, primarily private equity holdings including stakes in Anthropic, signaling the private AI market remains untouched by this transaction. This acquisition marks Citadel as a significant stabilizer amid the volatility of specialized AI investments, showing strategic restraint within its vast $71 billion asset pool.
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