October 13, 2026
AI companies themselves supply more than half of AI money: BIS counts 55.2% of inbound investment
BIS classed 46.4% of disclosed deal value as circular: the investor in these deals is also a supplier or a customer.
On Oct 13, the IMF named a correction in AI assets as one of three risks that could sharply tighten conditions in global markets.
The fund separately flagged circular financing: AI firms act as each other's investors, lenders and customers at the same time. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) broke this pattern down into numbers.
Counting the links. BIS took 1,246 AI firms and sorted them into five layers of the chain: chips, infrastructure, data work, models and applications. Over 2021–2025, 972 investment links formed between them.
Circular links make up 16.1% of deals by count and 46.4% by disclosed value. In 64% of them the pattern is the same: one AI firm invests in another AI firm and also supplies it with its own product. 73% start in the upper layers, with chip suppliers and cloud infrastructure providers.
The rest of the economy almost never works this way. BIS looked at more than 10,000 supplier-customer pairs in the US: a stake in the trading partner turned up in 3.3% of cases. In AI chips and cloud, the share is 15.2%.
BIS names the analogy outright. In the late 1990s, Lucent and Nortel lent money to telecom operators so they could buy the vendors' own equipment. The operators' revenue never arrived, and the vendors were hit with loan defaults and collapsing sales at once.
Headline sums vs. money paid. The IMF compiled 14 deals disclosed since 2023: about $300 billion in hyperscaler equity investments in weaker AI companies and $650 billion in debt, against $1.4 trillion in future revenue commitments. About $320 billion of that debt sits with the investees themselves.
The deals mix cash, long-term purchase commitments and residual value guarantees, where the guarantor covers a drop in the price of chips or data center equipment after a fixed term. Such commitments sit off the balance sheet, so the announced deal value and the money actually paid diverge.
US data centers are fed by more than Big Tech's mutual investments. A second stream comes from Asia's surplus economies: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
The true cost of these deals will show in a downturn: that is exactly when the off-balance-sheet guarantees kick in.