Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund establishes new PUT options position of approximately 9 million NVIDIA shares in Q1 2026, expanding bearish bet against the chip giant.

Situational Awareness LP, the fund managed by Leopold Aschenbrenner, declared a new stake in NVIDIA consisting of PUT bets (bearish options) worth close to 9 million shares in Q1 2026 filings. This represents over 11% of the fund's portfolio and is the second-largest position. Aschenbrenner previously held PUT bets worth 1.6 million shares in Q3 2025, which he sold off completely by the next quarter.

Multiple hedge fund managers—Michael Burry, Ken Griffin, Israel Englander, and Sander Gerber—also hold PUT options on NVIDIA. Bearish investors are betting that as AI shifts from training models to running autonomous agents, hardware requirements will change: complex sequential logic execution favors high-performance CPUs, where NVIDIA has virtually no market share in the traditional x86 enterprise data center CPU market (dominated by AMD and Intel), even though NVIDIA commands an estimated 90% to 95% market share in AI training GPUs.

The bearish thesis centers on a structural ceiling for NVIDIA GPU demand as compute requirements diversify away from GPU training toward CPU-intensive autonomous agent execution.