Key points
- Situational Awareness sold 11,519,078 Core Scientific (CORZ) shares in two block trades on Aug. 3, cutting the stake to 4.4% from 8.1%.
- Both blocks priced below the day's low. CORZ closed that session at $22.83, up 10.2%.
- Leopold Aschenbrenner stopped being a 5% holder on Aug. 3, so no further amendments are due on the stake.
- He still holds 14,089,395 shares, near $321 million at Tuesday's close.
Last week we'd laid out four filing dates and said the SEC calendar would narrow what Leopold Aschenbrenner actually sold. One of them landed Tuesday evening. It's the first document in this story that arrives with share counts and prices attached instead of a reporter's paraphrase.
Situational Awareness LP filed an amended Schedule 13D on Core Scientific (CORZ), the bitcoin miner that has been converting its sites into AI data centers. The fund's stake now stands at 14,089,395 shares, or 4.4 percent of the company. On July 15 it was 25,608,473 shares, or 8.1 percent.
Aschenbrenner signed the filing himself, and so did Carl Shulman, who has appeared as a reporting person beside him on every version of this document since the original last August.
What he sold, and when
Exhibit 99.2 lists the fund's trades in the 60 days before each of the filing's two measurement dates, July 15 and Aug. 4. There are four of them.
| Trade date | Shares sold | Price per share |
|---|---|---|
| July 14, 2026 | 134,011 | $22.4083 |
| July 15, 2026 | 265,989 | $22.1836 |
| Aug. 3, 2026 | 5,759,539 | $19.6896 |
| Aug. 3, 2026 | 5,759,539 | $19.4807 |
The two Monday lines are where the size went, and they're identical to the share at 5,759,539 apiece. The exhibit marks both with an asterisk, and the note underneath says they represent shares sold through block trades with unaffiliated third parties. A block trade is a large lot negotiated privately between two parties instead of being worked through the open market over a session. That phrase is the only description of the buyers anywhere in the filing.
Those two lines come to 11,519,078 shares for about $225.6 million, at an average near $19.59.
The price he took
Core Scientific traded between $19.86 and $22.98 during regular hours on Aug. 3. Both blocks priced under the bottom of that range. The stock finished the day at $22.83, up 10.2 percent from Friday, on 23.7 million shares against a 30-day average near 12.8 million.
Held to that close, the shares in those two blocks would have been worth about $37 million more.
Core Scientific had reported second-quarter results six days before the blocks. The July 28 filing showed a net loss of $1.16 billion and a loss of $3.32 a share against the 5 cents analysts were carrying. The stock closed at $18.12 the following session and recovered to $22.83 by Aug. 3.
Why this is the last look
Anyone who owns more than 5 percent of a US-listed company files a Schedule 13D or 13G and keeps amending it as the position changes. Item 5(e) of Tuesday's filing supplies the date the fund fell under that line: Aug. 3. The reporting duty ends with it.
So that's the last figure the public gets on any kind of live basis. Buy more, sell the rest, sell nothing at all, and the outcome on EDGAR reads the same. The next scheduled view is the quarterly holdings report covering June 30, due Aug. 14, and it's a photograph of the portfolio taken five weeks before the selling started.
How the position got here
| Filing | Shares held | Percent of class |
|---|---|---|
| Schedule 13D, Aug. 2025 | 17,682,918 | 5.8% |
| Amendment No. 1, Oct. 2025 | 28,756,478 | 9.4% |
| Amendment No. 2, July 15, 2026 | 25,608,473 | 8.1% |
| Amendment No. 2, Aug. 4, 2026 | 14,089,395 | 4.4% |
The fund crossed 5 percent in August 2025 and reached its largest position of 9.4 percent two months later, holding near that level into the summer. Both of the last two percentages rest on share counts from Core Scientific's own quarterly filings. The most recent one gives 321,340,441 shares outstanding as of July 23, and the July 15 figure used 317,885,292.
Core Scientific turned up in a second story on Tuesday as well. Bernstein named it, along with Cipher Digital (CIFR) and CleanSpark (CLSK), among the companies most exposed to the Texas order freezing new data center grid connections. The stock closed Tuesday at $22.82, a penny below Monday.
Our Situational Awareness fund page tracks these filings as they reach EDGAR. We wrote up the four deadlines this filing belongs to last Thursday, and the sale that started it the same morning. The Texas grid audit covers the other Core Scientific story from Tuesday. Before acting on any disclosure like this one, our look at whether copying hedge fund filings actually works is worth the ten minutes.
Sources
- Schedule 13D/A, Amendment No. 2, filed Aug. 4, 2026 by Situational Awareness LP, SAF AI GP LP, Situational Awareness LLC, Situational Awareness Partners LP, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Carl Shulman on Core Scientific, Inc.: 14,089,395 shares and 4.4% as of Aug. 4; 25,608,473 shares and 8.1% as of July 15; Item 5(e) date Aug. 3, 2026.
- Exhibit 99.2 to that filing: the four trades listed above, with the asterisked Aug. 3 lines described as block trades with unaffiliated third parties.
- Schedule 13D filed Aug. 19, 2025 (17,682,918 shares, 5.8%) and Amendment No. 1 filed Oct. 14, 2025 (28,756,478 shares, 9.4%).
- Core Scientific Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, filed July 28, 2026: net loss of $1,155,310 thousand, net loss per share of $3.32, and 321,340,441 shares outstanding as of July 23, 2026.
- Core Scientific daily prices for July 28 through Aug. 4, 2026, and the consensus estimate of a 5 cent loss per share for the second quarter.
