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.
On 8 November Jensen Huang told staff he had been unfaithful to his wife, and Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation into reports that he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. US officials believe the woman, linked to a Singapore firm that was one of Nvidia’s largest customers, worked for Chinese intelligence. She has not been charged, and China calls the claim baseless. The board says it has confidence in Huang and no reason to believe secrets were compromised. It matters here because of where Nvidia sits: it holds $99B of its customers’ shares, guarantees $105B of OpenAI’s rent, and has no named successor. Its shares fell 4.3% on 9 November while the rest of the chip sector rallied.
The rest of the map is being repriced. The Nasdaq fell 5.5% on 5 November, its worst day since April 2025, and won back about two thirds of that in two sessions. OpenAI took in $11B of a round first sized at $30B. Investors are discussing $1.2–1.3T for Anthropic’s IPO, down from talk of $2T a month ago, against $895B of compute commitments. Oracle paid up to 8.65% to borrow $10B. SoftBank reported a $7B quarterly loss, the largest part of it on power equipment ordered for AI data centres.
"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
"Equity and debt investments in the firms depreciate in value precisely when future revenue streams tied to them are impaired."
International Monetary Fund, Global Financial Stability Report, 13 October 2026, on the “wrong-way risk” in circular AI financing
"Jensen is Nvidia. Nvidia is Jensen."
Stacy Rasgon, analyst, Bernstein, to CNBC, 9 November 2026, on a company whose chief executive has no named successor
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: