A hedge fund founded by a former OpenAI researcher is positioning itself as a cornerstone investor in what could become one of the largest foreign-company listings in US history. Situational Awareness LP, run by Leopold Aschenbrenner, plans to be a major backer of SK Hynix’s upcoming Nasdaq ADR offering, which targets up to approximately $29.4 billion in proceeds.

The deal and the players

SK Hynix announced plans for its Nasdaq ADR listing on June 24, with trading expected to begin around July 10. The South Korean memory chip giant is a critical supplier to Nvidia, producing the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power the GPUs running everything from ChatGPT to crypto mining operations.

Situational Awareness LP, alongside Baillie Gifford and Coatue, has indicated interest in purchasing up to a combined $7 billion in the new ADRs. SK Hynix already constitutes around 6.5% of Situational Awareness LP’s disclosed portfolio. The fund, which launched in late 2024 with an initial equity exposure of roughly $225 million, has ballooned to approximately $13.7 billion in assets.

Aschenbrenner left OpenAI and published a viral essay on the trajectory toward artificial general intelligence that essentially served as the thesis document for his fund. The entire strategy revolves around public equities that benefit from AGI and AI infrastructure buildout.

Aschenbrenner’s conviction and the AI supply chain thesis

His fund’s rapid asset accumulation, from $225 million to $13.7 billion, suggests that limited partners share his conviction about the AI infrastructure buildout timeline. The fund focuses exclusively on public equities positioned to benefit from the march toward AGI, which makes SK Hynix a natural fit. SK Hynix has consistently maintained its position as the preferred HBM vendor for Nvidia’s most advanced chips, competing against Samsung and Micron in the same space.

By coming to Nasdaq, SK Hynix gains access to US capital markets and makes the stock accessible to US retail investors who previously would have needed to navigate Korean exchanges.

What this means for investors watching AI and crypto convergence

Baillie Gifford and Coatue, collectively committing up to $7 billion alongside Situational Awareness LP, represent significant institutional validation of the SK Hynix offering. When these players collectively commit up to $7 billion alongside a fund run by a former OpenAI insider, the market takes notice.

The risk to watch is concentration. When a single fund holds 6.5% of its portfolio in one company and then commits to buying more during an IPO, it’s expressing extreme conviction. Semiconductor markets are cyclical, and the last time memory chip makers were this hot, the subsequent correction was painful for investors who arrived late.