$16bn AI fund unwind exposes leverage risk at bitcoin miners turned data-centre plays
Situational Awareness LP's forced sale to Citadel pulls Riot, CleanSpark, HIVE and Bitdeer into scrutiny of AI-linked leverage.
A $16 billion block trade has drawn renewed attention to how closely several listed bitcoin miners are now tied to the fortunes of the artificial intelligence sector. Situational Awareness LP, a hedge fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, offloaded its entire public equity book to Citadel this month after leveraged positions in AI-linked stocks collapsed, according to reporting by Crypto Briefing.
The portfolio included conventional AI infrastructure names such as Bloom Energy, Nebius, CoreWeave, IREN and Core Scientific, alongside a cluster of bitcoin-mining companies that have pivoted towards renting out computing capacity to AI clients: Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, HIVE Digital and Bitdeer. Their presence in the fire sale underlines how thoroughly some crypto-mining balance sheets have become entangled with the AI trade over the past two years.
From near-fivefold gains to forced exit
Situational Awareness launched in late 2024 with roughly $225 million in initial capital and, by the fund’s own figures, had posted net returns of around 439% for the year to the end of June 2026, taking assets under management above $20 billion. That performance was built on leverage of close to four times the fund’s equity base — a ratio that left little room for error once AI-related share prices turned.
Key positions in the book fell by 40 to 50% in the weeks before the unwind, according to the report, forcing Aschenbrenner’s fund into a single block sale of its entire equity portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. The scale of the transaction — one of the larger disclosed hedge-fund liquidations tied to AI-sector leverage this year — has been read on trading desks as a signal that forced selling, rather than deteriorating fundamentals, drove much of the recent decline in AI-adjacent equities.
Why miners were caught in the blast radius
Riot, CleanSpark, HIVE and Bitdeer have each spent recent quarters diversifying away from pure bitcoin hashing towards hosting high-performance computing workloads for AI customers, a strategy that has drawn generalist capital — and, evidently, leveraged capital — into what were once niche mining stocks. That crossover cuts both ways: it broadens the investor base these firms can tap, but it also exposes them to sentiment swings in AI markets that have little to do with hashrate, halving cycles or bitcoin’s own price action.
For a UK and European institutional audience increasingly weighing exposure to listed mining equities as a bitcoin proxy, the episode is a reminder that such stocks now carry a second layer of macro risk tied to AI-infrastructure spending cycles and leveraged positioning in that sector, on top of the usual mining-economics variables of energy costs and network difficulty.
What comes next
Citadel’s willingness to absorb the entire portfolio in one trade, presumably at a discount to prevailing market prices, has been interpreted by some traders as a bet that the AI-stock rout has largely run its course. Whether that view extends to the mining names will depend on continued growth in their AI-hosting revenue and contract wins, rather than on bitcoin price movements alone.
The episode also raises a broader question for regulators and risk managers: how many other funds are running comparable leverage against concentrated AI positions, including exposure through crypto-mining equities that have quietly become AI infrastructure plays. Situational Awareness’s collapse, from a 439% year-to-date return to a forced $16 billion exit within weeks, suggests the answer matters well beyond a single fund’s balance sheet.
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