A $20.7bn AI book, and the thing it hedges hardest is TSMC

Most funds that own the AI trade started owning it after it was obvious. Value Aligned Research Advisors, a Princeton manager that files for VAR AI Fund, LP and its offshore twin, owned it on 31 December 2022 — a month after ChatGPT shipped and long before the rest of its book existed.

That first filing held twenty-four positions, $220.6m, every one of them ordinary common stock. Here are the twelve largest.

That is the hyperscalers, the foundry, the lithography, the memory, the deposition and etch tools, and the two companies that sell the software chips are designed in. It is not a portfolio that got lucky when the theme arrived. It is the theme, bought early and small.

Thirteen quarters later the same manager filed 107 positions worth $20.71bn. What changed is worth reading carefully, because almost none of it is a change of mind.

The belief held. The instrument did not.

Read that table with one number in mind: none of the option columns are money. A 13F reports the value of the underlying on an option line, not the premium paid for it. So the $11.26bn of call underlying in the March book cost some smaller and undisclosed sum, and no arithmetic available to anyone outside the fund can recover it. The book grew 94 times over by the reported total. By common stock alone — the only column that means what it appears to mean — it grew 38 times.

The shape change lands in a single quarter. Through September 2024 this is a concentrated long-only book, sixteen to thirty-one positions, top ten around 90%. By June 2025 it is a different animal: options are 53% of it, puts exist for the first time, and the top ten has fallen to half. It moved into options and spread out in the same three months.

The thesis moved down the stack

Twelve of the original twenty-four names are still there in March 2026: Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, TSMC, Intel, Micron, Western Digital, ASML, Applied Materials, KLA, Lam Research. Of the twelve that left, seven were chip design, networking and smaller chip names — Cadence, Synopsys, Arista, Juniper, GlobalFoundries, Onto, Rambus — and two were datacenter landlords, Equinix and Digital Realty. The other three were General Motors, GitLab and Aurora.

What replaced them is the physical layer:

Optics, neoclouds, fuel cells, power distribution, contract manufacturing, natural gas, and the mechanical contractor that installs the cooling. The fund sold the companies that draw the chip and bought the companies that energise the building. That is not a different thesis. It is the same thesis, one layer further down, at the point where it stopped being about design and started being about electricity and concrete.

There is a tidy division in how the two halves are held. The old mega-cap convictions are expressed in options — Nvidia $3.04bn of call underlying, Alphabet $2.30bn, Amazon $2.06bn. The new names are held mainly in common stock.

Both sides of the same company

Since June 2025 the fund has held a call and a put on Taiwan Semiconductor at the same time, every single quarter.

Four quarters, a ratio that never leaves the range 59–71%, and both legs growing together. That is a maintained structure, not a position someone forgot to close.

And in March it is by far the largest put in the book. The March filing has twelve put lines totalling about $1.01bn of underlying. TSMC is $635.8m of it — 63% of every put in a 107-position book. The remaining eleven puts, Nvidia and Broadcom and Qualcomm and the rest, split the other $373m between them.

So a fund whose entire portfolio depends on advanced chips getting made carries its largest single put on TSMC.

What this establishes, and what it does not

Established. The filings are on record and the parser’s totals agree with the filer’s own stated totals on all sixteen. The fund held the AI stack in December 2022. It moved most of its exposure into options in mid-2025. It rotated from chip design into power and physical infrastructure. It has run a two-sided TSMC position for five consecutive quarters, through June 2026, at a stable ratio.

Not established, and not knowable from this document. Whether the TSMC put is a bearish view on Taiwan, one leg of a collar, a financing structure, or a risk-reversal — a 13F cannot distinguish them and neither can we. What any of it cost. What the fund’s actual return has been. Whether it holds ordinary short stock, which a 13F never reports, so an absence here is not evidence of anything.

A change we would flag but cannot read. Put coverage fell from 9.1% of the book to 4.9% between December and March. It is tempting to line that up against what happened to AI stocks in July 2026. Do not. The March filing is a snapshot of 31 March. The June filing, made on 17 August, showed puts back at 7.3% of a $40.11bn reported total and kept both TSMC legs, the put at 59% of the call; it too is a snapshot, taken before July.

Nobody is writing about it. TEXXR’s record holds no article naming Value Aligned Research or its VAR AI funds since January 2022. Over the same span it holds 16 on Situational Awareness, another AI fund that files a 13F, the first in August 2025.

Sources

Every figure here is summed from the position lines of the sixteen 13F-HR filings made by Value Aligned Research Advisors, LLC under CIK 0001963565, covering the quarters ended 31 December 2022 through 31 March 2026. The two filings quoted most are the first, accession 0001085146-23-000432, filed 2023-01-30, and the March 2026 book, accession 0001963565-26-000003, filed 2026-05-18. The June 2026 figures are from accession 0001963565-26-000005, filed 2026-08-17, whose header totals also agree. Where a quarter was amended the amendment is used and the original discarded, which affects only December 2024 and September 2025. Our parser checks its own entry count and dollar total against the totals the filer states in each filing’s header; all sixteen agree.

A 13F reports long positions in 13(f) securities as at the quarter end, filed up to 45 days later. It never reports ordinary short stock, so an absence is not evidence of a position. On an option line it reports the value of the underlying, not the premium paid, the strike, or the expiry — so every call and put figure above describes exposure and not money, and a put may be an outright bearish view or one leg of a hedge with no way to tell which. It reports no leverage and no cash. It is not a fund’s return.

We map each CUSIP to a ticker by hand, because there is no free CUSIP reference feed. One mapping in this book needed a judgement rather than a lookup: 464287234 is the MSCI Emerging Markets fund, identifiable only from its class title — read as a bare CUSIP among semiconductor neighbours it would have become a semiconductor position.

Percentages are shares of the filing’s own reported total, which mixes common-stock value with option underlying and therefore is not a portfolio value. Where the text says “common” it means only the non-option lines. The growth multiples compare 31 December 2022 with 31 March 2026 on the same basis in each case.

Coverage counts are TEXXR article searches for “Value Aligned Research”, “VAR AI” and “Situational Awareness”, 1 January 2022 to 27 October 2026, run on 27 October 2026. The first two return nothing. The third returns 18 articles, of which 16 concern the fund; the other two use the phrase in another sense.

No prices are used anywhere in this piece, and no return is claimed. Our point-in-time archive begins 2024-07-29 and the provider sells a rolling window, so the first seven filings can never be priced forward. The full book by quarter is at /fund/value-aligned-research. Not investment advice.