When the AI Economy Eats Itself: OpenAI, Nvidia, and the Trillion-Dollar Circular Deal Question

Welcome back to the table where we dissect the AI infrastructure moves that actually matter to your bottom line. Today we're diving into something that sounds abstract but is anything but: the circular deal phenomenon that just hit a new milestone with OpenAI's latest mega deal.

If you've been following the enterprise AI buildout, you know the names by now. OpenAI. Nvidia. AMD. CoreWeave. Oracle. What you might not realize is how tightly these companies are now financially intertwined in a way that's starting to look less like a robust supply chain and more like a daisy chain held together by hope and hyperscale ambitions.

Let's map the money flows, because this matters to every enterprise leader making infrastructure bets right now.

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The OpenAI-Nvidia-AMD Money Loop

OpenAI just struck a partnership with AMD worth tens of billions over multiple years, with OpenAI set to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct GPUs starting in 2026. AMD handed OpenAI warrants for up to 160 million shares, potentially giving OpenAI a 10% stake in the chipmaker. AMD's stock jumped 24% on the news.

Here's where it gets interesting. Nvidia recently pledged to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. Meanwhile, OpenAI buys cloud computing from Oracle, which purchases chips from Nvidia, which has a stake in CoreWeave, which provides AI infrastructure back to OpenAI.

If your head is spinning, that's the point. With recent deals including partnerships through the Stargate project, OpenAI has committed roughly $1 trillion in new buildout spending in just the past two weeks.

The enterprise implications are significant, because this isn't just Silicon Valley playing hot potato with capital. These are the companies powering your AI initiatives, building your data centers, and manufacturing the chips running your inference workloads.

Why Enterprise Leaders Should Pay Attention

The structure of these deals raises three critical questions for anyone betting enterprise budgets on AI infrastructure:

1. The demand signal question. When Nvidia invests in OpenAI, which then uses those funds to buy Nvidia chips, it becomes difficult to determine the true underlying demand for AI compute versus artificial demand created by circular capital flows. For procurement teams trying to forecast pricing and availability, this matters enormously.

2. The concentration risk. The AI boom has become increasingly fueled by just a handful of companies turning to one another for the vast amounts of capital and computing power needed to drive their breakneck growth. If one link weakens, the whole chain feels it. Your vendor risk assessments just got more complicated.

3. The bubble memory. During the dot-com era, companies like fiber-optic giant Global Crossing engaged in direct revenue roundtripping, cutting deals where they paid money to another company for services, and that company agreed to purchase equipment of exactly equal value. When the bubble burst, Global Crossing went bankrupt.

Industry analysts are noticing the parallels. Investors during the dot-com era are wary of vendor financing and circular deals, which were hallmarks of spending at that time. The concern isn't that today's deals are identical to 2000-era fraud, but that they share structural characteristics that can inflate perceptions of market health.

The Defense: It's Different This Time

To be fair, there are meaningful differences. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back on circular revenue concerns, stating the investment side is not tied to anything and represents an opportunity to invest in what's likely to be the next multitrillion-dollar hyperscale company.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC they need as much computing power as possible, explaining they're unable to launch many features in ChatGPT and many products that would generate lots of revenue simply because of a lack of compute power. If OpenAI had 10 times as much computing power, revenue might not be 10x but wouldn't be far off, he suggested.

The argument is straightforward: demand is real, compute is genuinely constrained, and these partnerships are rational responses to market conditions rather than financial engineering.

What This Means for Your Enterprise AI Strategy

For innovation leaders and CIOs building enterprise AI capabilities, here's what matters most:

Diversification just became more important. OpenAI's diversification beyond Nvidia gives them pricing leverage when buying chips, which could ultimately save them money in negotiations. The same logic applies to your infrastructure strategy. Multi-cloud and multi-vendor approaches provide negotiating power and reduce concentration risk.

Watch the fundamentals, not the headlines. Stock price movements following these announcements are dramatic, but the real test comes in deployment and revenue generation. Investor Brad Gerstner cautioned these are purely announcements, not deployments, noting that ultimately the best chips will win.

Plan for compute scarcity. Whether or not the circular deal structure is sustainable, one thing is clear: The deals provide evidence that the world will remain compute-constrained despite best efforts to bring massive supply online. Build your roadmaps accordingly.

The circular deal debate is a signal about the maturity and sustainability of the AI infrastructure market you're buying into. Smart enterprises are watching not just who's making deals, but how the money flows and what that reveals about true demand versus manufactured momentum.

AI News to Know

1. Pentagon Grapples with AI's Dark Potential. The Pentagon is confronting profound anxieties about AI in warfare, including fears of autonomous killer robots, hallucinations from AI psychosis, and nuclear escalation risks driven by AI systems.
   Read more →

2. The Great AI Influencer Divide. AI influencers are revolutionizing marketing in 2025, with traditional human influencers costing upwards of $78,000 per post compared to AI influencers providing similar campaigns for just $1,694 per post. The global influencer marketing industry is projected to hit $32.55 billion in 2025, with AI influencers capturing a significant share. Yet brands face a dilemma: cost efficiency and 24/7 availability versus authenticity concerns that could alienate audiences.
   Read more →

3. Compute Constraint Becomes Competitive Advantage. OpenAI's deals with both Nvidia and AMD, totaling commitments around $1 trillion including the Stargate project, underscore how access to computing power has become the defining competitive moat in enterprise AI. AMD granted OpenAI a performance-based stock warrant that will vest as specific rollout milestones are met, which could give OpenAI up to a 10% stake in AMD.
   Read more →

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TL;DR:

• OpenAI's latest AMD partnership and Nvidia investment create a trillion-dollar circular deal structure where the same capital and companies keep trading with each other.

• This concentration raises questions about real demand signals, vendor risk, and echoes of dot-com era circular financing that ended badly.

• Compute scarcity is real and driving rational partnerships, but the financial entanglement makes market health harder to assess.

• Enterprise leaders should diversify infrastructure vendors, focus on deployment fundamentals over announcement hype, and plan for continued compute constraints.

• The Pentagon's AI fears and the AI influencer cost debate both highlight the same tension: efficiency versus reliability and authenticity in high-stakes AI deployments.

Final Thought

The AI infrastructure market is building something genuinely transformative, but it's doing so with a financial structure that looks increasingly like a closed loop. For enterprise leaders, the smartest move is to build strategies that acknowledge both the genuine innovation happening and the structural fragility that comes with such concentrated interdependence.

Watch the deployments, not just the deals. Diversify your vendors. And remember that in any market where everyone is both customer and investor to everyone else, the fundamentals matter more than ever.

Stay sharp,

Cat Valverde
Founder, Enterprise AI Solutions
Navigating Tomorrow's Tech Landscape Together