$45B to $10B. The Anthropic stake stayed.

Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness sold its public equity portfolio to Citadel this week after margin calls, while keeping a reported $5 billion Anthropic stake that could not have been sold on the same timeline. A bank group is reportedly in talks to lend $15 billion for a Texas data center that Anthropic would lease, with Google providing guarantees. The Commerce Department also signed letters of intent that would put the federal government on the cap tables of five private semiconductor companies.

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The leverage was on the part he could sell

Situational Awareness, the AI-focused fund Leopold Aschenbrenner started after leaving OpenAI, sold its public equity portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel this week. Reporting puts the fund at roughly $45 billion at the start of July and about $10 billion after the sale.

The fund ran concentrated, levered positions in AI infrastructure companies including SK Hynix, CoreWeave, Nebius, Micron and Bloom Energy. Those stocks fell between 35% and 47% during July, according to reporting on the unwind. Margin calls followed.

The position that survived carried no margin. Situational Awareness holds a reported $5 billion stake in Anthropic and will continue as a private investment firm.

One conviction, expressed in two formats, produced opposite outcomes over the same twenty days. The public positions were levered, marked continuously and subject to a lender's judgment about collateral. The private position was not. The repricing that took the fund apart never reached Anthropic because there was no mechanism for it to do so.

That does not make one mark right. A price that updates every second reflects the marginal seller under margin pressure. A price that updates when a round closes reflects the last negotiated transaction. Both are real.

The rest is arithmetic. A private position that was a modest share of a $45 billion portfolio is roughly half of a $10 billion one, and nobody bought a share. The fund became a private investment firm by subtraction.

Whose credit is building the data center?

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A group of banks led by Morgan Stanley is reportedly in talks to lend $15 billion to Nexus Data Centers for a campus in Hubbard, Texas. The financing would include a roughly $14 billion bridge loan and a revolving facility. The site includes a natural gas plant with 1.6 gigawatts of generating capacity, and Anthropic would lease the facility.

Google has reportedly issued guarantees covering billions of dollars of Anthropic's lease and power-purchase obligations across four leases. In return, it would receive roughly 20% equity in the data center and power project.

The borrower is a data center developer. The tenant is a private company without an investment-grade rating. The credit belongs to a third party that already owns equity in the tenant and would now own equity in the building too.

That structure sits outside Anthropic's cap table. Reporting in June described the company signing more than a dozen preliminary lease agreements with US developers, together covering more than a gigawatt. If a meaningful share of that expansion is financed against someone else's balance sheet, Anthropic's growth and its equity are being underwritten by different parties on different terms. An equity buyer gets the growth. The guarantee stays with Google.

The transaction is reported and not final. Terms could change, or the deal could fail to close. Reporting this month also described Nvidia in talks on debt guarantees tied to OpenAI's Ohio campus. The terms and structure differ, so the two deals are not directly comparable. In both cases, however, credit support rather than a new equity investment would finance the next increment of frontier AI capacity.

A new name on five private cap tables

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The Commerce Department announced letters of intent with seven companies on July 29, covering up to $874 million in CHIPS Act funding. In exchange, the government would take a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each.

Two of the seven are publicly traded: GlobalFoundries, at up to $300 million, and Aeluma, at up to $30 million. The other five are private: Kepler (up to $245 million), Multibeam (up to $140 million), Extropic (up to $75 million), Thintronics (up to $50 million) and OBSIDIA Semiconductors (up to $34 million).

These are letters of intent. Every figure is an "up to," diligence is unfinished, and no definitive agreement has been signed. The announcement establishes a template in which federal funding for private semiconductor companies is conditioned on equity rather than structured as a grant.

That would put a shareholder with policy objectives and no fund life on each private cap table. What it means for a later buyer would depend on the rights attached to the shares, including information rights, transfer restrictions and consent provisions. None of those terms has been published. Until definitive agreements exist, there is nothing to read.

📊 Power 20 Watch

PitchBook published its Q2 venture secondary note on Tuesday, framing the next phase of the market as a succession question. SpaceX listed in June. OpenAI and Anthropic have each reportedly explored potential listings, though neither company has filed to list on a public exchange, and an IPO or other liquidity event may never occur. Those three names have accounted for a large share of venture secondary volume for years, and a listing moves a company out of that market by definition.

Volume is at a record, but its future composition is unsettled. If the three most-traded names exit over roughly eighteen months, the market will need a comparable cohort to replace them. The answer will shape what a "liquid" private company means in 2027.

Naming replacements would be guesswork, but the qualifications are clear. A company needs employee tenure long enough to produce sellers, enough shares to absorb large transactions, an issuer that permits transfers and enough public reporting for two strangers to agree on a number. Very few companies clear all four. That is a tighter constraint than any valuation table.

SpaceX supplies the near-term calendar. Its first quarterly results as a public company are scheduled for August 4, followed on August 6 by the first major lock-up tranche lifting on roughly 911.5 million shares, according to Bloomberg and CNBC reporting cited in Tuesday's edition. The selling pattern will offer the first observable data on how a very large pre-IPO holder base behaves once the restriction comes off.

"Power 20" refers to Augment's internal ranking of selected private-market activity based on Augment's proprietary methodology combining reported financing activity, secondary indications, and public disclosures. It may not represent the broader private market and should not be treated as a valuation benchmark. Inclusion does not constitute a recommendation, endorsement, valuation opinion or indication that a company is more likely to generate investment returns or complete a liquidity event. The methodology involves judgment and may change without notice.

💨 Quick Takes

• Nscale agreed to acquire Anyscale for a reported $1.65 billion. The London-based AI cloud company is buying the startup behind the Ray compute orchestration framework, which was valued at $1.38 billion in its 2022 Series C. The price comes from a person familiar with the deal; neither company confirmed it. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
• Okta is acquiring Permiso Security for reportedly just under $200 million, almost all in cash. Okta disclosed no terms; the reported price comes from a source with knowledge of the deal. Permiso had raised about $29 million, making this a strategic acquisition at roughly seven times the capital raised.
• Scale AI named Francis deSouza chief executive. The former Google Cloud COO and Illumina CEO replaces interim chief Jason Droege, who had held the role since Alexandr Wang left for Meta last year. Scale is widely held in secondary portfolios, and the appointment answers one of the open questions around the company.
• Zoox received the first US approval for paid driverless deployment.NHTSA cleared the Amazon subsidiary to deploy up to 2,500 vehicles a year through 2028, with no human controls. Other private autonomy companies will be measured against that precedent.

💰The Funding Lineup

The following financing rounds are included for market context only and are not recommendations or valuation opinions.

• Xsight Labs: more than $300M at a $2.8B post-money valuation (July 30). Fidelity Management & Research led the round, with Atreides, Artisan Partners, Battery Ventures, Intel Capital, T. Rowe Price and Valor Equity participating. The Israeli company makes Ethernet switching and DPU silicon, the connective tissue between accelerators rather than the accelerators themselves. Its prior mark was $500 million in 2021.
• Moonshot AI: $3.5B at a reported $35B valuation (July 29). The round was oversubscribed against an initial target of $1 billion to $2 billion, with China's National AI Industry Investment Fund among the leads, following the Kimi K3 release. Most US accredited investors cannot access the company. That makes the round a frontier-lab mark set in a separate liquidity pool.
• Commonwealth Fusion Systems: $1B in equity financing (July 30). The company disclosed neither a lead investor nor a valuation, describing its backers only as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and infrastructure and industrial corporate partners. Total capital raised is now roughly $4 billion. The investor list says as much as the round size: infrastructure and sovereign money, rather than venture money.
• Simile: $200M Series B at a $2B valuation (July 30). Greenoaks led the round, with Index, Bain Capital Ventures and CVS Health Ventures participating. The company builds "agentic twins" of real people to test products and brands. It raised a $100 million Series A five months ago, doubling its mark in twenty weeks at the applications layer.
• DataBahn: $40M Series B (July 30). Insight Partners led the round, bringing total funding to $59 million. The Dallas company filters and routes enterprise telemetry before it reaches a destination that charges by volume. It is an unglamorous business attached to the cost side of every AI deployment.

📈 Data Point of the Day

$121.7 billion

That is the size of the US venture secondary market over the trailing twelve months through Q2 2026, according to PitchBook's note published Tuesday. The firm estimates that direct secondaries accounted for $90.3 billion to $123.9 billion, with a midpoint of $107.1 billion, while GP-led secondaries totaled $14.6 billion. Most of this market consists of individual holders selling individual positions, rather than funds restructuring funds.

🎓 Manual

The denominator effect

An investor may set an allocation as a percentage of total portfolio value, say 15% for private assets. Public holdings are marked daily; private holdings are marked when a round or transaction supplies a new number. When public values fall sharply, the denominator shrinks while the private numerator stays still. The private allocation can then exceed its target without a single share changing hands.

Some investors respond by selling private positions into the secondary market, which is one reason supply may increase after a public drawdown even when nothing has changed at the underlying companies. The effect can also run the other way, as it appears to have this week: selling the liquid side of a portfolio to meet obligations can leave the illiquid side as a much larger share of what remains.

👀 What We're Watching

• Whether other funds have the same shape. The Situational Awareness unwind paired a levered public portfolio with a large private stake in one strategy. Public reporting has not established how common that combination is among AI-focused managers. Additional disclosures, if they occur, may provide context.
• How many of Anthropic's other leases carry outside guarantees.Reporting in June described more than a dozen preliminary leases with US developers. Hubbard is the one whose financing has been described in detail. Whether it is representative or exceptional remains unclear.
• Whether the Commerce letters become definitive agreements, and on what terms. Five private companies are involved, and no equity terms have been published. Those documents, if filed or described, would show what a government minority position on a private cap table contains.
• Europe's AI gigafactory process. The EU opened bidding this week on a program it reportedly expects to unlock around €30 billion of investment. Submissions close November 12, with awards targeted for early 2027. European private infrastructure and compute companies would be the direct beneficiaries, and the timetable is now public.

Too many great quotes about leverage here, but this is always a favorite:

It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked. — Warren Buffett