Each line is a deal, and its arrow points the way the money goes. Follow the arrows and the money often comes back to where it started.
Bigger bubbles are bigger companies by market value or latest valuation, ranked roughly rather than drawn to scale. Many headline figures are letters of intent, not contracts, and are drawn dashed; each deal's status is shown in its detail. The $600B of Nvidia–OpenAI financing reported in July 2026 became a signed $105B guarantee in August: headline and contract can differ by half a trillion dollars.
The AI circular economy, mapped. Nvidia funds the labs, the labs buy compute, the clouds buy Nvidia's chips. Every deal above is sourced.
Anthropic’s draft IPO prospectus, as Reuters reported on 1 October, has Broadcom agreeing to lend it up to $42B in notes that can turn into Anthropic shares, about a third of what Anthropic owes on a $125.2B five-year lease of Broadcom-designed chips. Anthropic warns that a supplier which is also its lender creates “potential conflicts of interest”. It is Nvidia’s playbook, now copied. A week later SpaceX was reported to be raising $40B of debt to buy Nvidia chips, and Amazon to be moving $8B of Nvidia chips it already owns into an outside vehicle that leases them back.
The promises are getting harder to see. Morgan Stanley counts more than $3.1T of guarantees, leases and other support that five hyperscalers, Nvidia and Broadcom have committed to other companies’ AI build-outs. Meta guarantees about $28B of value to the bondholders who own its Louisiana campus, and Alphabet’s backstops on other companies’ data-centre payments rose from $17B to $44B in six months. The revenue is being recounted too: OpenAI’s run rate turned out to be about $50B, not the $68B reported, and chip stocks fell the day it came out.
"It's not circular because we put a little bit of money in, and a lot of money comes back."
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology conference, 10 September 2026, with $99B of Nvidia's money in its customers
"The increasing indebtedness of AI firms combined with opacity and, at times, 'circular arrangements' that can be associated with this financing, can complicate the assessment of risks and could amplify losses if expectations disappoint."
Bank of England Financial Policy Committee, record of its September 2026 meeting, published 30 September 2026
"It feels that there's quite a concentrated bet right now on two companies being able to generate enough revenues to support all the financing that's happened."
Robert Leitao, managing partner, Rothschild & Co, to Reuters, 1 October 2026, on Broadcom’s $42B loan to Anthropic
Historical scores are applied retrospectively by hand, using the same six indicators. They are judgements about the record, not measurements — each carries its basis, listed below. The telecom marker is the closest structural analogue to what this map shows: Lucent, Nortel and Motorola lent their own customers the money to buy their equipment, booked the sales as revenue, then wrote the loans off.
What this is. A measure of how closely the current picture matches the characteristics common to historical asset bubbles. It is not a forecast, it says nothing about timing, and it is not investment advice. Half the weight is computed from the tracked deals on this page; half is hand-set and sourced.
What it is not. These tracked deals were selected because they are circular — that is the point of the map. The circularity figure describes this deal set, not the market as a whole, and the denominator is always shown. An index where every needle pointed the same way would be a press release; market behaviour currently points the other way, and says so.
Newest first, by the date each deal began, each with its source. The tags say how real a deal is: