CONCEPT
Circular Investing in AI Infrastructure
The pattern by which hyperscaler AI investment generates revenue at the same hyperscalers — the endogenous loop in which the signal justifying the investment is produced by the investment itself.
Circular investing is the phenomenon, increasingly documented in the AI infrastructure sector, by which the major investors in AI capability — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and their peers — are to a significant degree investing in each other. Nvidia sells chips to OpenAI, which rents compute from Microsoft, which sells cloud services to enterprises adopting AI, which generates revenue that justifies continued investment in Nvidia. Oracle finances OpenAI's infrastructure; OpenAI's projected revenue justifies Oracle's capital commitments. The pattern is not necessarily fraudulent — each transaction is real — but the revenue streams that justify the trillion-dollar investment commitments are, in significant part, generated by the investment itself. The Opus 4.6 Minsky simulation identifies this as a textbook speculative-to-Ponzi dynamic at the infrastructure layer of the AI economy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The pattern has been identified by multiple analysts, including Paul Kedrosky (who called it the AI infrastructure Minsky moment), Howard Marks of