Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP, disclosed $47 million in put option positions against Nvidia and AMD in its Q4 13F filing, marking the first significant bearish semiconductor stance from a fund managed by a former frontier AI lab insider. The positions represent roughly 18% of the fund's reported book and arrive as Nvidia trades near $140 per share, down 22% from its November peak but still up 89% year-over-year.
The filing shows 340,000 Nvidia put contracts and 180,000 AMD puts, both with March and June expiries bracketing the typical data center refresh cycle. Aschenbrenner, who left OpenAI in April 2024 after authoring the widely-circulated "Situational Awareness" memo on AGI timelines, launched the fund in August with $220 million in commitments from family offices and several Founders Fund-adjacent allocators. The fund's name references his internal OpenAI essay predicting AGI by 2027, a timeline that assumes uninterrupted compute scaling and chip supply.
The timing matters because Nvidia's forward guidance, delivered in late January, projected 15-18% sequential revenue growth for Q1 2025 — the slowest quarter-over-quarter expansion since Q2 2023. Hyperscalers including Microsoft and Google have both signaled H1 capex moderation, citing digestion periods for existing GPU clusters and architectural shifts toward custom silicon. Aschenbrenner's thesis, according to two LP letters reviewed by Markets Edge, centers on a 6-9 month air pocket in H100 and H200 demand as training runs plateau and enterprises delay Blackwell deployments pending software stack maturity. The fund does not short the stocks outright; it buys puts while maintaining long exposure to AI application layer companies including Anthropic-backed public vehicles and several private stakes.
This diverges sharply from consensus. Tiger Global, Coatue, and D1 Capital all added Nvidia shares in Q4, with aggregate long positions up $1.8 billion quarter-over-quarter across the three firms. Aschenbrenner's bearish positioning is not a repudiation of AI itself — the fund holds $89 million in long positions across OpenAI's corporate debt, Anthropic preferreds via secondary structures, and Microsoft equity — but a calculated view that chip demand runs six quarters ahead of revenue realization and that current multiples price in zero digestion risk. Worth noting: Nvidia's forward P/E sits at 31x versus a five-year average of 38x, but that average includes multiple periods of crypto-driven volatility, not enterprise AI infrastructure buildouts.
Allocators should watch March earnings from Nvidia (scheduled for February 26) and Microsoft's Azure revenue breakout (April 24) for any mention of "optimization" or "efficiency" in AI capex language — both terms appeared in Meta's Q4 call and preceded a 9% single-day Nvidia decline in early February. Custom silicon timelines from Google's TPU roadmap and Amazon's Trainium2 ramp will clarify whether hyperscaler in-house chip efforts materially displace merchant silicon by late 2025. If Nvidia's March quarter guidance lands below $32 billion (Street consensus sits at $33.2 billion), the puts gain value. If Blackwell orders accelerate and TSMC's CoWoS capacity expands faster than expected, the March expiries expire worthless and the fund rolls into longer-dated positions or exits.
Aschenbrenner's fund now manages $310 million after a 29% net return in its first five months, driven primarily by long positions in foundation model infrastructure and European AI compute plays. The Nvidia puts represent the largest single short in the portfolio by notional value and the only one targeting a U.S. mega-cap. The next 13F, due in mid-May, will show whether the fund added to the position or began unwinding as Blackwell shipments clarify.
The takeaway
First major AI-native allocator to short Nvidia via puts, citing demand digestion risk during hyperscaler capex moderation.
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