At a glance
Sharon AI raised US$1.6 billion in June anchored by Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness, which lost 67 per cent in July and sold the leveraged portion of its listed book to Citadel.
Sequoia partner Alfred Lin told Bloomberg Television the money had gone to a company Sequoia invested in, without naming it. The Wall Street Journal identified Source Foundry two days later.
Sharon AI fell 57 per cent between 18 June and 29 July, and IREN fell 19.5 per cent across July.
Australia's listed names ended July close to flat. Goodman fell 0.08 per cent for the month and the ASX 200 returned 2.3 per cent.
Whether the fund still holds its 19.9 per cent of Sharon AI is not settled, and a ten per cent owner has two business days to report a sale.
Situational Awareness returned to investing on 4 August
Sharon AI closed a US$1.6 billion financing in June anchored by Situational Awareness and funds managed by Oaktree. Aschenbrenner told investors on 24 July that the fund was up 439 per cent for the half. Situational Awareness finished July down 67 per cent, and on 30 July sold the leveraged portion of its listed book to Ken Griffin's Citadel.
The fund ran about US$45 billion of gross positions in early July. Reuters reported Citadel picking up "the portion of Situational's public portfolio that was financed by leverage from brokers", leaving the private stakes where they were. Mike Novogratz, the Galaxy Digital founder, called it "the most catastrophic hedge fund blowup of our careers" on the All Things Markets podcast on 3 August.
On 4 August the fund put US$400 million into Source Foundry, taking its total there to US$500 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. Source Foundry was founded last year by two Stanford researchers, Abdulmalik Obaid and Joe Burg, and plans to build the machines, equipment and software that print circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. That step is dominated by ASML, whose extreme ultraviolet systems are used for leading-edge production. ASML reported sales of €32.67 billion in 2025, and a single machine can cost upwards of US$400 million. Source Foundry, which is yet to ship a product, is valued at US$5 billion.
Sequoia’s Alfred Lin named Source Foundry on Bloomberg TV
Bloomberg reported the investment on 6 August as going to a Sequoia-backed company it did not name. The Wall Street Journal identified Source Foundry two days later. Sequoia partner Alfred Lin then said on Bloomberg Television, in an interview alongside Pat Grady about the firm’s US$10 billion push into AI and reindustrialisation, that Situational Awareness had put US$400 million into Source Foundry, a company Sequoia had also invested in. No reporting has Sequoia participating in this round.
Bloomberg had reported the day before that Sequoia is aiming about US$10 billion at AI and reindustrialisation, naming manufacturing, defence, robotics, energy and the reshoring of supply chains among the targets.
Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan, who backs companies at or near formation, set out the thesis in a statement to the Journal: "If you trace the AI supply chain upstream, from models to chips to the machines that manufacture them, each layer becomes increasingly critical and constrained. Source Foundry tackles the tightest bottleneck: tooling for semiconductor manufacturing, starting in lithography." Zhan argues that AI demand grows on an exponential software curve while semiconductor manufacturing capacity grows on a linear industrial-equipment curve, a mismatch she calls the chip wall. The Journal names Substrate, xLight and Inversion Semiconductor as startups working on the same layer.
The private book Situational Awareness kept runs along that same chain. It retained a multibillion-dollar stake in Anthropic, the GPU cloud company Fluidstack and the chip startup MatX, and earlier this year co-led a roughly US$1 billion round in Physical Intelligence with Lux Capital, which the Journal reported valued the robotics model developer at US$11.5 billion. Aschenbrenner had told investors he would run up to 30 per cent of the portfolio in private companies.
On 29 July Aschenbrenner reached a preliminary agreement to sell about US$3.5 billion of the Anthropic stake to a consortium led by Greenoaks and Sequoia, then withdrew it the following morning. The Citadel transfer followed the next day.
Sharon AI fell 57 per cent between 18 June and 29 July
Sharon AI and IREN are both Australian-founded and listed on the Nasdaq. Sharon AI fell from US$92.70 on 18 June to US$40.09 on 29 July, then rose 21.7 per cent on 30 July, a move Capital Brief attributed to news of the liquidation. It closed at US$49.79 on 7 August. IREN fell 19.5 per cent across July, which the Motley Fool attributed to a US$832 million restricted stock grant to management, cash burn of about US$2.2 billion a year and sector weakness.
Both added contracted capacity while the shares fell. Sharon AI, a neocloud that rents out GPU computing from space inside other operators' data centres, reached 212MW of secured AI factory capacity and US$8.8 billion of contracted value at its second-quarter results on 6 August, with US$1.86 billion of cash at 30 June. IREN signed US$2.8 billion of AI cloud contracts in July and is building 800MW at Bundey in South Australia for energisation in 2028.
Whether Situational Awareness still holds its Sharon AI stake is not settled. It disclosed 19.9 per cent of the Class A stock on 29 June and confirmed the position in an insider filing on 2 July. Situational Awareness is an insider under US rules at more than ten per cent, which gives it two business days to tell the market if it sells. It has reported no sale, which does not by itself confirm the position. A filing signed 4 August puts the fund at 4.4 per cent of Core Scientific, down from 8.1 per cent on 15 July. Its 11,698,835 IREN shares at 31 March sit below the 5 per cent line that would oblige a beneficial ownership filing.
Goodman fell 0.08 per cent, the Nasdaq 3.2 per cent
Listed name | Move | Period |
|---|---|---|
Sharon AI (Nasdaq: SHAZ) | −57% | 18 June to 29 July |
IREN (Nasdaq: IREN) | −19.5% | July |
Megaport (ASX: MP1) | −8.5% | 17 July |
Goodman Group (ASX: GMG) | −0.08% | July |
NEXTDC (ASX: NXT) | +2.5% | month to early August |
Nasdaq Composite | −3.2% | July |
ASX 200 | +2.3% | July |
Source: FNArena, Kalkine, the Motley Fool, Simply Wall St and StockAnalysis, July and August 2026.
The Nasdaq Composite fell 3.2 per cent for the month and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 20.6 per cent. The ASX 200 returned 2.3 per cent, with the information technology sector down 2.79 per cent. NEXTDC fell about 14 per cent through the first three weeks of July and recovered from there. It upsized a A$2.3 billion senior debt facility on 10 July and reported pro-forma contracted utilisation of 740MW at 30 June. Megaport fell 8.5 per cent on 17 July, which Kalkine attributed to a broad retreat from technology shares.
Robert Swift of TAMIM Asset Management wrote on 6 August that Australian investors "are not immune to this simply because the ASX has no meaningful AI hardware exposure of its own", because the exposure arrives through global equity allocations rather than the local exchange. Aware Super's head of investment strategy Michael Winchester said on 10 July that about 15 per cent of the fund's high-growth option sat in the AI thematic, and that "this was a concentration that wasn't clearly defined by asset class boundaries". Its chief investment officer Simon Warner had said in December 2025 that AI financing showed "nothing that flashes red, but things that certainly flash orange".
Syenta raised A$37m and put Pat Gelsinger on its board
The closest Australian analogue to Source Foundry is Syenta, an Australian National University spin-out now headquartered in Sydney, whose co-founders include chief executive Dr Jekaterina Viktorova and Professor Luke Connal. Its product, Achyon, is a production tool for advanced packaging that deposits and patterns metal in a single step, using what the company calls localised electrochemical manufacturing. Syenta says the process uses about 40 per cent fewer steps than conventional fabrication and runs at three times the throughput of existing fabs. Reuters reported in April that it is targeting high-volume production by 2028.
Syenta raised a A$37 million Series A on 21 April, co-led by Playground Global and the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, which put in A$10.1 million, taking total funding to A$51.1 million. Pat Gelsinger, Intel's former chief executive and now a general partner at Playground, joined the board with the round. An earlier A$8.8 million round led by Investible brought Blackbird, SGInnovate, OIF Ventures, Salus Ventures, Jelix Ventures, Brindabella Capital, Wollemi Capital and In-Q-Tel, the strategic investor for the United States intelligence and national security community, onto the register. Syenta took a A$4.8 million Industry Growth Program grant on 27 February.
The Reconstruction Fund lists the use of its money as expanding Syenta's patent portfolio, procuring machinery, establishing early production capacity in Australia and building a United States customer engagement team. Syenta employs 33 people in Australia and the funding is expected to create 25 more in fabrication, operations and engineering. Its first United States site is a 3,500 square foot demonstration hub at Arizona State University's research park in Tempe, which Reuters placed near Intel's and TSMC's plants.
Syenta sits inside a sector of about 180 organisations supporting roughly 5,790 full-time equivalent jobs, on Semiconductor Sector Service Bureau figures. S3B is developing Australia's first National Semiconductor Roadmap, a 15-year plan announced in March.
What to watch
Any insider filing on Sharon AI. A Form 4 or an amended shareholding notice would settle whether the 19.9 per cent survived the Citadel transfer. The fund has two business days to report a sale, and the Core Scientific filing shows it lodging a disclosure when a position falls through a threshold.
The 14 August portfolio report. Situational Awareness owes its quarterly holdings filing that day. It covers positions as at 30 June, a month before the Citadel transaction, so the IREN line will appear as it stood then.
Whether the fund raises again. Aschenbrenner invited existing investors to commit fresh capital from 1 August, and some were offered portfolio assets to buy.
The next Sharon AI contract announcement. Sharon AI restates the share of capacity contracted to end customers in its contract releases. The last figure was 120MW on 4 August. The next one is the first read on how much of the 212MW is sold.