Citadel's flagship Wellington fund posted 5.9% returns in July, its largest in years, after the company bought assets from collapsed Situational Awareness at discounted prices. Aschenbrenner's fund had bet that the AI boom would drive sustained demand for chips, memory, data centers and electricity. The hedge fund had reportedly grown to approximately $45 billion at the beginning of July before the market downturn eroded the value of its portfolio. Situational Awareness had been reportedly negotiating to sell its stake in AI startup Anthropic. His writings emphasized growing demand for advanced semiconductors, high-bandwidth memory, power generation and data centers, themes that became central to both AI investing and Situational Awareness' portfolio construction.