The AI financial Ouroboros

Jorge Costa Oliveira

Last Friday, OpenAI announced it had raised $110 billion in its latest funding round; Amazon invested $50 billion, Nvidia $30 billion and SoftBank $30 billion. OpenAI buys GPUs from Nvidia. OpenAI invests in CoreWeave. Meta signs a $14 billion deal to secure GPU cloud capacity from CoreWeave. CoreWeave leases GPUs from Nvidia and sells computing power back to OpenAI. Meta makes a $14 million deal to secure CoreWeave’s GPU cloud capacity. Microsoft puts $13 billion into OpenAI and $5 billion into Anthropic. OpenAI commits to investing $300 billion [over five years] to fund Oracle’s construction of a 4.5-gigawatt (GW) data center as part of its Stargate megaproject. Oracle incurs $105 billion in debt plus $248 billion in off-balance sheet leases to build Stargate. 57% of its revenue pipeline comes from OpenAI. Oracle takes on $105 billion in debt plus $248 billion in off-balance-sheet leases to build Stargate. 57% of its revenue pipeline traces back to OpenAI.

A concrete example involves Nvidia, OpenAI and AMD. In September 2025, Nvidia and OpenAI announced a landmark partnership to deploy 10 GW of artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputing capacity using Nvidia systems. To support this, Nvidia said it intended to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI – essentially $10 billion per GW of computing delivered, with Nvidia directly financing OpenAI’s expansion through phased investments as each portion of infrastructure comes online.

Shortly afterward, OpenAI struck a parallel deal with AMD to supply 6 GW of GPUs over the coming years. Instead of a large upfront payment, AMD granted OpenAI warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares – c. 10% ownership of AMD, for $0.01 – to be acquired in tranches as OpenAI purchases more GPUs, up to the full 6 GW. The first tranche is triggered at 1 GW, with subsequent tranches tied to OpenAI’s acquisition of the full 6 GW and to AMD’s stock reaching specified price targets.

In other words, OpenAI is literally betting on AMD’s future stock price as part of its payment structure.

One report noted that these acquisition thresholds imply an ambitious $600 per share target for AMD – a reflection of how deeply stock-price momentum is embedded in the deal’s design.

Microsoft and Meta are also part of this web – Microsoft through its large equity stake and multi-year cloud partnership with OpenAI, and Meta as a major buyer of AI hardware – effectively financing much of the underlying infrastructure on which Nvidia, OpenAI and AMD depend.

These companies – and others – have become intertwined in a circle of massive funding and investment, largely in AI infrastructure, boosting the capabilities and valuations of interconnected firms in what amounts to a financial AI Ouroboros: a closed loop in which the same capital circulates among different companies, each recording that circulation as revenue, investment gain or strategic partnership value.

In mythology, the Ouroboros is a snake – or dragon – that devours its own tail, forming a virtuous circle.

However, this financial AI Ouroboros raises several concerns. Many of these circular deals rely on achieving very high share prices, debt-financed bets that require exponential growth and high P/L and P/E multiples, all signals of classic bubbles.

While it’s possible that this capital serpent could catalyze a virtuous cycle with the AI ​​revolution living up to expectations, risk analyses of some of OpenAI’s (and Oracle’s) most recent funding rounds show that it’s also quite possible we’ll see this financial Ouroboros gradually consuming more and more capital, ultimately devouring the dreams of tech company leaders and their investors and funders.

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