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.
Reuters has seen the confidential draft of Anthropic's IPO prospectus, and it shows how much of this map rests on one company's future sales. About 80% of the $518B cannot be cancelled or must be paid whatever Anthropic uses, including $161B of equipment leases with Broadcom, which has disclosed that it backstops an unnamed customer's rack leases. The suppliers are now paying for the business in their own shares. On 24 September Akamai, a $15B company, disclosed an $11.6B contract with Anthropic and handed it a warrant over about 5% of Akamai, the structure AMD used with OpenAI and Meta.
The money keeps getting dearer. SoftBank paid OpenAI its last $10B on 1 October with bonds priced at up to 9.75%, the largest junk-bond sale on record. The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.29% on 30 September, its highest in nearly 20 years. Oracle served a force majeure notice on its New Mexico Stargate campus, and the Bank of England warned that the "circular arrangements" in AI financing could amplify losses. OpenAI, meanwhile, is reported to be raising at $1.4T.
"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
"Sustaining this level of investment would require an AI market approaching $6 trillion annually."
Bain & Company, Technology Report 2026, 29 September 2026, on the market needed by 2031. Today's uses, it estimates, reach $1.2–1.8 trillion.
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: