Leverage met a crowded trade Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund, peaking near 45 billion dollars in assets and running about 4x leverage, was forced to sell roughly 16 billion dollars of public equities to Citadel on 30 July, with assets collapsing to about 10 billion in a self-reinforcing spiral that dragged down its own holdings. … Read more
Alibaba’s AI investing has become a structure: model companies return equity value, rising compute demand feeds Alibaba Cloud orders, and a memory bottleneck is met with an upstream stake. It resembles the group’s old playbook, except today it backs interdependent, sometimes competing, firms. The history is consistent. A 2017 DAMO Academy with a 15 billion … Read more
The first-half 2026 funding numbers for embodied AI are genuinely startling. IT Juzi counts 93.47 billion yuan deployed, up fivefold year on year, across 322 rounds, a 137% increase. Include overseas via GG Robot and the figure is 132.5 billion, up 428%. Same trend: a tide of capital rushing in. Where the money went The … Read more