Bubble size is roughly proportional to valuation or market cap. Many headline figures are letters of intent, not contracts; 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.
Fortune ran the numbers in April 2026: strip out the paper gains on Anthropic stock and both companies' AI businesses are a good deal less profitable than they look. SpaceX's IPO filing showed Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI paying about $2.3B a month for its Colossus compute. Nvidia has invested in SpaceXAI, Anthropic and Reflection AI, and built the GPUs they are renting. Anthropic's newest contract, $35B with Lambda, goes a layer further: Nvidia funds the lab, funds the cloud, sells the cloud its chips, rents 18,000 of them back, and is reported to hold the lease on the Texas site.
Since July the argument has moved to the credit market, which is harder to talk up. CoreWeave's default swaps price a coin flip. Oracle borrowed $43B to cover negative free cash flow. SB Energy lost $3.2B on $139M of revenue and is asking the public for up to $7B. Equity reprices in a week. A covenant lasts the life of the loan.
"The idea that it is circular is — it's ridiculous."
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, on the vendor-financing charge, as Bloomberg counted $750B of new Nvidia deals in a week, 27 July 2026
"The only regret that I have is that I didn't invest more and sooner."
Jensen Huang on Nvidia's near-$50B of equity in OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier labs, earnings call, 26 August 2026
"The AI ecosystem requires $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2030 to justify current infrastructure spending. The trajectory falls roughly $800 billion short."
Bain & Company, Global Technology Report, September 2025. The next edition is due this month.
Historical scores are applied retrospectively by hand, using the same six indicators. They are judgements about the record, not measurements — each carries its basis. 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 74 deals tracked on this page; half is hand-set and sourced.
What it is not. These 74 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.
In rough chronological order. Status tags show whether something is signed, completed, a letter of intent, or paused. Click any source to read the original reporting.