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.
Nscale's IPO prospectus, filed on 18 September, is the clearest look yet inside the neoclouds this map depends on. Nvidia sits on four sides of the company: shareholder, customer, guarantor of its Texas lease and supplier of every chip. Anthropic can cancel its $44.6B of contracts tranche by tranche if Nscale delivers late, and Nscale says it has no binding financing to build them. Broadcom's latest filing shows the same shape in its own business: it backstops up to $29B of an unnamed customer's rack leases, and may lend that customer up to $42B more to pay the rent.
In September the money got more expensive. The Fed raised rates on 16 September, and its chair blamed part of the climb in the 10-year yield, which touched 5.01%, on hyperscaler borrowing. SoftBank is paying junk-bond rates, guided at up to 9.875%, to fund its last OpenAI instalment. Oracle sold $20B of new shares, and almost half its operating cash flow was customers paying in advance. The Nasdaq still closed at a record on 21 September.
"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 so-called hyperscalers are out in the market raising funding, and so the competition for capital is real and I think it partly explains the increase in yields."
Kevin Warsh, Federal Reserve chair, press conference after the Fed raised rates, 16 September 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, 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: