Over half the money invested in AI firms in 2021–25 came from other AI firms, central-bank researchers found.
Lucent and Nortel lent to their own customers in the 1990s telecom boom, then lost both loans and sales.
OpenAI is backing Oracle’s data-centre build with $300bn of business it hasn’t yet raised.
55.2%
funding from AI firms
46.4%
AI-to-AI value circular
1,246
AI firms studied
Why it matters Part of AI’s booming sales is the industry funding its own demand.
Other side The researchers also see sound reasons: suppliers know their customers best, and buyers lock in scarce chips. Warning sign, or sensible financing?
CME Group plans futures on rental rates for Nvidia’s H100 and B200 chips, out to 36 months.
H100 rents hit $8 an hour in early 2024, then fell below $2 in late 2025.
Yet most new futures never draw lasting volume, writes Marc Rubinstein.
$2.3tn
2030 market est.
$5.86
B200 per GPU-hour
$2.77
H100 per GPU-hour
Why it matters A traded price for compute would show whether the AI boom is paying off.
Other side A GPU Graphics processing unit: the chip, mostly from Nvidia, that trains and runs AI models.-hour isn’t standard: chips age fast and rival indexes disagree. Can a market run by a few giants ever be deep?
EY counts over 550 million active UPI Unified Payments Interface: India's instant mobile payment system, run by NPCI. users, but only about 62 million mutual fund investors and about 50 million active equity participants.
Many households find investment products complex, volatile or hard to judge, so access alone won’t create lasting investors, EY says.
It proposes a five-layer ‘Wealth Stack’ (access, data, intelligence, advice, trust) and sees 100 million+ new long-term investors by 2035.
550mn+
active UPI users
~62mn
mutual fund investors
38%
investors under 30
Why it matters India built the payment rails; investing needs advice, not just apps.
Other side 100 million is EY’s ambition, not a forecast. Could more ‘guidance’ mean more mis-selling?
Apollo’s Torsten Sløk says Hyperscaler The giant cloud companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle) that build the biggest data centres. credit rests on operating cash flow rising from $600bn in 2025 to $2tn in 2030, about 27% a year.
Alphabet’s free cash flow turned negative in April–June; it sold over $50bn of bonds in the first half, including a 100-year bond.
Some debt sits off the books, like Meta’s ~$27bn Hyperion campus, funded through a venture mostly owned by Blue Owl funds.
~27%
yearly growth needed
$50bn+
Alphabet bonds, H1
$1tn+
capex need by 2028
Why it matters Shares, bonds, private loans and pensions now ride the same AI bet.
Other side Unlike 2008’s low-income households, today’s borrowers are among the richest, highest-rated firms ever. Bubble, or big build?