The power couple of AI is getting married in Carmel, days after groom Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund nearly blew up

Leopold Aschenbrenner is getting married this weekend in Carmel, Calif., to Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Fortune first reported their engagement in October. It is, the Wall Street Journal reports, a lavish affair fit for the AI power couple: beginning, naturally, with a colloquium of panels and breakouts, followed by a ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa and a send-off to their honeymoon at a forest spa retreat.

But the groom is set to tie the knot after having spent this entire week desperately trying to keep his fund afloat.

The twentysomething became known as the “Nostradamus of AI” after building his hedge fund, Situational Awareness, to $45 billion in capital on a concentrated bet on hot memory chip and data center names, like CoreWeave and SK Hynix. The Journal reports he was leveraged three to four times on these bets, borrowing three to four dollars for every dollar of capital.

For two years that worked. But on the week of Aschenbrenner’s wedding, a black swan event...