The image shows the dizzying financial round-tripping happening inside the AI world. Let’s unpack it: who is investing in whom, and what do some of these players do?

OpenAI is at the heart of this. It’s the biggest builders and biggest spenders in AI, the maker of ChatGPT, which requires massive computing power. That explains why OpenAI buys billions of dollars’ worth of GPUs from Nvidia.

Nvidia is the industry’s fuel, supplying chips for nearly every major model, and it has agreed to invest $100 billion in OpenAI.

OpenAI is also spending $300 billion on cloud infrastructure with Oracle. Oracle’s data centers run on Nvidia chips, so Oracle pays Nvidia while hosting OpenAI.

CoreWeave rents Nvidia GPUs to AI startups; Nvidia owns about 7% of CoreWeave and buys roughly $6 billion of cloud capacity from them, another circular money flow between Nvidia and model builders.

All of this makes the AI economy look enormous, but also tightly interdependent. Some see a healthy, self-reinforcing cycle. Others see something shaky, a system full of financial round-tripping that could signal an AI bubble.