A map of who is paying whom, and how much of it is real

The Circular
Trillion

Nvidia invests in OpenAI. OpenAI buys compute from Oracle. Oracle buys GPUs from Nvidia. The money goes round, and every lap of it gets reported as a new record.

This is that circle, drawn to scale — and then measured against things you have actually seen.

Compiled 2 September 2026 16 companies · 28 flows All figures USD

01 — The loop

Follow the arrows and you end up back where you started

Each strand is an announced flow of money. Thickness is the headline value; the moving dots run from payer to receiver. Hover a company to isolate its strands, or pick a row from the ledger.

Chipmakers Model labs Clouds & hosts Capital

Strand colour follows the payer. Dashed strands are flows where no dollar value was ever disclosed — drawn thin, because nobody outside the room knows the number.

The ledger

02 — Announced vs. banked

Most of this money has not moved

The headline totals mix three very different things: cash that has cleared, contracts that will be paid over five to ten years, and promises that are conditional, non-binding, or simply unconfirmed by the companies named in them. Split the same 28 flows by what they actually are:

Totals cover only the flows charted above, and several are ranges or caps counted at their headline number. This is a shape, not an audit. Flows with no disclosed value — the Broadcom accelerator programme, the AMD warrant, OpenAI’s 6 GW Instinct order — are excluded entirely.

03 — The ladder

Nine orders of magnitude, one axis

A billion is not a big million. Each rung of this ladder is ten times the one below it, which is the only way to get a house and a hyperscaler onto the same page. Brass rungs are AI money; the rest are things that already exist.

The same numbers, drawn honestly — one linear bar, 2026 spending

Four companies plan to spend more on AI infrastructure this year than the world spends on foreign aid, video games, cinema tickets and recorded music combined — roughly sixteen times over.

04 — In units you have held

Pick a number. See what it buys.

$0

05 — Read this before you quote it

Three ways this page could mislead you

A commitment is not a payment

OpenAI’s $300B Oracle contract does not begin until 2027. Microsoft has funded $11.8B of its $13B. Announced value and cash out of the door differ by roughly an order of magnitude across this dataset.

Headline numbers get cut quietly

Nvidia’s $100B letter of intent became a $30B investment. A reported $250B Ohio backstop settled at a $105B cap. OpenAI’s own compute plan fell from $1.4T by 2033 to about $600B by 2030.

Some of it is one newspaper

Oracle’s $40B Nvidia order and Anthropic’s $200B Google commitment were each reported by a single outlet and confirmed by neither party. They are marked unconfirmed above and should be read that way.

Sources