#疑似AI股神建仓看涨AI “AI Stock God” Is Back: Rebuilding Previous “Liquidated Positions” but Lowering Leverage

The “AI Stock God’s” Situational Awareness fund collapsed after suffering the largest loss ever recorded by a single hedge fund one month ago. Now, it is making a comeback.
On September 11, the Financial Times reported that Situational Awareness founder Leopold Aschenbrenner recently began rebuilding large trading positions in technology stocks including AMD, Intel, SK Hynix, SanDisk, and AI startup CoreWeave.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said that after almost all of his previous brokerage relationships fell apart, Aschenbrenner turned to the little-known specialist broker Clear Street to return to the market. The move has drawn significant attention because his trading approach closely resembles the operations that caused massive losses in July.
Nomura strategist Charlie McElligott had already detected unusual signals. He noted that on Friday and the Tuesday following the Labor Day holiday, a series of large Flex Call trades appeared across multiple AI- and semiconductor-related stocks. The “mysterious buyer” spent a total of $315 million on option premiums, involving $1.1 billion in Delta exposure and $5.8 million in Vega exposure. This pattern of “spot prices rising while volatility also rises” was almost identical to the market characteristics seen before the turbulence in July.

The Same Stocks, the Same Strategy
Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said that the new positions recently established by Situational Awareness were all implemented through Flex options, covering the core holdings that had previously been liquidated. McElligott listed specific option trades observed by Nomura’s trading desk last Friday and Tuesday: For AMD, 5,000 call options expiring in January 2026 with a strike price of $540.01 were traded on Friday, with total premiums of $18.7 million; on Tuesday, the fund purchased a further 3,700 contracts with a strike price of $580.01, paying $17.5 million in premiums.
For clean-energy company Bloom Energy, total premium spending over the two trading days was approximately $48.2 million, while its share price rose 17.5% over the same period.

CoreWeave rose 18% over the two days, with total option premiums exceeding $43 million.
In addition, SK Hynix, SanDisk, DRAM-related stocks, and Intel all saw similar large purchases of deeply out-of-the-money calls. All of the above contracts were deeply out-of-the-money options, intended to drive price momentum by triggering a large-scale gamma squeeze and thereby indirectly lift the underlying stock prices.

Situational Awareness rose to prominence during the AI boom, while Aschenbrenner became one of the industry’s most closely watched technology investors. However, the sharp correction in AI stocks this summer caused the fund to suffer losses totaling tens of billions of dollars, ultimately forcing it to sharply reduce leverage and sell large portions of its holdings.
To survive the crisis, Situational Awareness sold most of its public-market positions to Citadel. Although the move allowed the fund to continue operating, it also marked the temporary end of its previously aggressive strategy.
In a letter to investors at the end of July, Aschenbrenner said he would “find another day to fight again” and promised to “learn the necessary lessons.” He also said the fund would “continue to operate in a hybrid public-private form,” while its public-market investments would be “managed on a fully paid basis.”

A Shift in Leverage Structure, but Not in Logic
Unlike the high-leverage total-return swaps obtained through major investment banks such as Goldman Sachs during the July liquidation, Aschenbrenner has chosen Flex options this time. The Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter, said that using fully-paid options limits the maximum loss to the premiums paid, theoretically avoiding the risks of margin calls and liquidation. However, this structural adjustment has not fundamentally changed the strategy’s logic: It still involves building large exposures in relatively illiquid momentum assets in an attempt to induce market participants to follow, triggering a chain reaction of price increases.
McElligott noted that this correlation of “spot prices rising and volatility increasing” has recently once again become a positive driver for volatility-dispersion strategies after individual technology stocks experienced sharp swings. The July liquidation left a deep impression on Wall Street. According to reports, brokers that had previously worked with Situational Awareness were all investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice, leaving Aschenbrenner almost “blacklisted” by mainstream financial institutions. Against this backdrop, he turned to Clear Street, a broker known in hedge-fund circles for its focus on the technology sector. The Financial Times described this as Aschenbrenner’s effort to “rebuild his Wall Street relationships and rebound by learning from the largest single loss in hedge-fund history.”

Market Watches for a Second Round of Risk
The key question for the market now is whether this strategy can work again or whether it will repeat the path to collapse seen in July. Structurally, Aschenbrenner will bear the full gains and losses this time, rather than sharing risk exposure with brokers through total-return swaps (TRS). Once momentum reverses, the option premiums will fall entirely to zero, and there will be no way to cushion the blow by adjusting leverage. At the same time, the valuation logic of AI-storage-related stocks is itself facing challenges. McElligott observed that the volatility structure of these highly concentrated AI-themed stocks remains extremely sensitive after their sharp summer correction, and any interruption in momentum could trigger rapid deleveraging.
Historically, strategies that attempt to trigger gamma squeezes by driving up deeply out-of-the-money options depend heavily on continued participation from market followers. Once market participants recognize the concentration of the positions and choose to hedge or short, the outcome often proves completely opposite to the initial expectation.$SNDK