AMD

Situational Awareness LP, the fund Leopold Aschenbrenner runs, reported put options on 4,764,100 AMD shares in its 13F for the quarter ended 31 March 2026 (filed 18 May 2026, source) — valued at $969.2 million, the value of the shares those puts referenced at that quarter’s $203.43 close, not a premium paid or capital at risk. The same filing lists a separate long position of 99,138 AMD shares, worth $20.2 million. A 13F cannot say whether the puts were a hedge, or when either position was opened; it shows only quarter-end. AMD closed at $485.39 on 30 July 2026, so the value of the shares those puts referenced had risen to roughly $2.31 billion — up about 139% in the four months since the quarter’s close. Its next filing, for the quarter ended 30 June, has no AMD line at all. The fund’s full book has its other 2026 filings.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) is DeadRisk’s second-order name in chips: not a model maker, not a hyperscaler, but the accelerator maker investors treat as the AI buildout’s second bet, alongside Nvidia. In May 2015, TEXXR’s archive has the company telling reporters it couldn’t just be “the cheaper solution” and was betting on a new Zen CPU architecture and GPUs built around high-bandwidth memory. Eleven years later, HBM-equipped AI chips are exactly what AMD sells, and the question in that 2015 headline — genuine alternative, or permanent runner-up — is still the one this record is built to test.

AMD’s fiscal 2025 revenue reached $34.64 billion, up 34% from fiscal 2024’s $25.79 billion. Net income rose 164% to $4.34 billion from $1.64 billion; free cash flow more than doubled to $5.52 billion from $2.41 billion.

The year opened on disappointment. AMD’s fourth-quarter results, reported 3 February 2026, were AMD’s first $10 billion quarter — revenue up 34% year over year to $10.3 billion, Data Center revenue up 39% to $5.4 billion — but a first-quarter guide of $9.8 billion undershot what investors wanted, and the stock dropped more than 15%. Three weeks later the tone flipped: Meta agreed to acquire up to 6GW of AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD’s AI-accelerator chip line, in a deal valued at more than $100 billion, with an option that could see Meta own up to 10% of AMD.

The rest of the spring confirmed the turn. AMD’s first-quarter results, 5 May 2026, beat on both lines — revenue up 38% to $10.25 billion, Data Center revenue up 57% to $5.8 billion — and the stock jumped more than 15%, closing above $400 for the first time. Two weeks later AMD pledged more than $10 billion to Taiwan’s chip-packaging ecosystem, with TSMC ramping production of Venice, AMD’s next-generation server-chip line. On 5 June Broadcom’s earnings miss dragged US chipmakers down more than $1 trillion in a single session, and AMD fell 10.86%. The stock recovered anyway, closing at $580.91 on 30 June — its 52-week high, and 186% above the March quarter-end mark that Situational Awareness LP’s put referenced.

On 20 July AMD unveiled Helios — its first rack-scale AI system, a whole server rack of chips sold as one product — built to rival Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform, priced at an estimated $5 million-plus per rack and slated to ship later in 2026 to Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI among others. Two days later, AMD and Anthropic signed a server deal worth tens of billions: Anthropic will buy up to 2GW of MI450, AMD’s next flagship AI-accelerator chip, starting in the first half of 2027, and AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic itself. A week later, Core Scientific and AMD announced a deal for AMD to secure more than 500 megawatts of US data-center capacity starting in 2027, with an option to scale to 2.5 gigawatts. The stock fell to a post-peak low of $429.56 on 29 July — down 26% from the June high — as disappointing SK Hynix earnings dragged chip stocks, AMD included, into a broader selloff, before chip stocks rallied on strong Microsoft and Lam Research earnings and AMD closed up 13% on 30 July. A stock that falls 26% one way and rallies 13% the other inside a month is a stock the market has not settled on.

Then came Intel’s quarter. Intel guided below estimates on 29 October and blamed a PC slowdown driven by memory prices. On the call its CFO put 2026 PC units down about 12%, the second half down more than 20% and 2027 down about 10%, with no lasting recovery until memory prices ease. AMD sells into that market. Client, its PC chip business, brought in $3.06 billion of AMD’s $11.54 billion second-quarter revenue, up 23% year over year — a little over a quarter of the total, by our arithmetic. AMD traded about 12% lower on 30 October with no analyst changes of its own. Servers cut the other way. Intel said server CPU demand outruns supply into 2028 and that next year’s share will go to whoever can ship, and chief executive Lip-Bu Tan claimed Coral Rapids, its 2028 server chip, will compete with AMD’s and the generation after will pass it. Those are Intel’s claims about a rival’s roadmap. The lead analysis has the rest of the print.

TEXXR’s most recent 500 tracked AMD edges, queried 27 October, run financial (29.6%), launch (22.4%) and partnership (21.0%), with regulatory (7.0%), acquisition (4.8%), controversy (3.8%) and personnel (3.2%) making up most of the rest. Competitor-predicate edges are almost absent: just 1.4%, seven edges out of 500. That’s true even though one edge in the record literally labels AMD “the main challenger to Nvidia in the artificial intelligence processor market”, and another groups AMD with Intel against a Nvidia-Qualcomm-MediaTek push into the AI data-center CPU market. The extracted graph is not mostly a rivalry story; it is a record of AMD signing its own contracts, with Meta, Anthropic, three hyperscalers and Core Scientific.

Positioning: how much of AMD is sold short, on the record brokers file twice a month. It lags by design — read it as where the crowd stood, not where it stands.

Signals in the coverage and filing record, not trade ideas:

• 3 November: AMD’s third-quarter report. Two lines to read against Intel’s call: AMD’s client guide for the fourth quarter, against Intel’s forecast of PC units down more than 20% in the second half; and what AMD says about server CPU supply, if share next year goes to whoever can ship. Data Center revenue, which more than doubled in the second quarter to $6.7 billion, and MI450 timing remain the larger figures.
• The MI450 and Helios delivery dates. Anthropic’s MI450 shipments are promised from the first half of 2027; Helios is due to hyperscalers “later in 2026.” Anthropic’s S-1 names no fixed dollar amount: it commits to an initial tranche of Helios rack-scale systems in calendar 2027, subject to deployment conditions, which it expects to exceed $20 billion if fully taken, with an option on about as much again.
• The Core Scientific option. 500+ megawatts is a lease; 2.5 gigawatts, if AMD exercises the option, is a far larger power commitment. Track it in filings, not announcements.
• Whether Meta’s warrant vests. AMD’s 24 February 8-K gave Meta a warrant for up to 160 million AMD shares at a cent each. The first tranche vests when the first gigawatt ships; the last needs six gigawatts and a $600 share price. Vesting, or a report that tranches lapsed, is the next hard data point.

AMD lives or dies by the same constraint as these names — small equal-weighted groups, one constraint each. Not investment products: see all categories.