Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness hedge fund bought call options on Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, and Credo Technology following the equity drawdown in late April. The positions appear in recent 13F-HR filings and represent the fund's first disclosed options deployment on semiconductor names since launch. AMD closed the quarter down 11.2% from February highs. Broadcom traded 8.7% below its March peak. The fund did not disclose strike prices or expiration windows.

Aschenbrenner launched the fund in late 2024 after publishing *Situational Awareness*, a widely circulated whitepaper arguing that AI compute infrastructure would require $600 billion in annual capex by 2027. The thesis centered on data-center buildout, custom silicon, and interconnect density as the binding constraints on model scaling. The options trades follow that framework cleanly: AMD supplies MI-series accelerators to hyperscalers outside Nvidia's orbit; Broadcom manufactures custom ASICs for Google and Meta; Credo produces high-speed SerDes chipsets for rack-level connectivity. All three names sold off in tandem with Nvidia during the April risk-off cycle, creating what volatility desks now call "correlation compression" — multiple semiconductor names trading as a single idea.

The positioning matters because it signals conviction on entry timing, not directional change. Aschenbrenner has been public about AI infrastructure for eighteen months. The fund already held equity stakes in several data-center REITs and power utilities. Adding options suggests the thesis remains intact but the fund now sees asymmetric setups in names that briefly traded below replacement cost for their embedded buildout optionality. Worth noting: implied volatility on AMD 30-day calls spiked to 47% in late April, the highest reading since October 2023. Broadcom's 60-day skew inverted briefly, a rare condition that makes out-of-the-money calls cheaper relative to at-the-money strikes. The fund appears to have stepped in during that dislocation.

Allocators should watch for two follow-on events. First, whether Situational Awareness adds equity positions in the same names during Q2, which would confirm the options were part of a staged entry rather than short-term volatility arbitrage. Second, monitor the fund's exposure to power infrastructure and co-location facilities — the non-semiconductor half of the AI buildout trade. If those stakes expand alongside semiconductor options, it suggests Aschenbrenner is layering multiple angles on the same macro view rather than rotating from one to the other. The next 13F disclosure lands in mid-August.

The fund's average position size in disclosed holdings sits at $18 million. The options trades are smaller, likely low single-digit millions in premium. That keeps the bets inside the fund's risk budget while preserving capital for follow-on deployment if volatility returns. Broadcom reports earnings May 29. AMD follows June 3. Both will guide for second-half data-center silicon demand.