The circular machine.
Chip makers invest in labs; labs commit the money back to clouds; clouds spend it on the chip makers. Everyone has heard the story — this report draws it as a network, with a receipt class on every edge. And the first honest finding is about the receipts themselves: of the twenty-one relationships in this machine, NOT ONE carries a value from a filing. The biggest numbers in tech are announcements.
published 2026-08-27 · data cutoff 2026-08-27 · edition 1 — updated only by a new dated edition
Every relationship, classed.
Thirteen companies, twenty-one claimed money relationships. Edge color is the receipt class; node color is the company's role in the loop — chip makers, labs, hyperscalers, infrastructure. The chips filter by class; the slider hides edges below a dollar threshold. Turn everything off except "stated, no figure" and more than half the machine remains — that is the finding.
What the claims stand on.
Twenty-one edges, graded. Zero carry a filed value. Nine ride press reporting, three are announced ceilings — and twelve have no public figure at all. The public story of the AI money loop is mostly told in numbers nobody has signed.
The loop, company by company.
Stated dollars flowing OUT of each company against stated dollars flowing IN — only where a figure exists, colored by role. The labs sit at the center of the stated money; the chip maker sits at the end of nearly every arrow.
All twenty-one, every field.
The record behind the picture — payer, receiver, the stated figure or its honest absence, and the class. Deliberately the last view: a table is the record, not the story.
How this was curated, and what it cannot say.
Every edge in this network is a claimed money relationship between two named companies in the AI build-out, curated one at a time from public statements. Each edge carries a source class, and the class is the finding: an edge is drawn solid only when its dollar figure appears in a securities filing; press-reported figures draw as lighter lines; a relationship the companies have stated but never priced draws as a dotted hairline labeled "stated, no figure."
We read filings first — 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and 8-Ks on SEC EDGAR — then reputable press for the figures companies announce but never file. Where a filed number corroborates the scale of a relationship without pricing the specific counterparty (Microsoft's capital expenditure, for example, corroborates but does not itemize its Nvidia purchases), the edge stays in its honest class: the split is not filed, so the line does not draw solid.
Values are in billions of US dollars as most recently claimed; null means no public figure exists, and null is never rendered as zero scale. We provide no data of our own — every edge traces to a receipt a reader can pull, and the receipt class is printed on the exhibit. The dataset is a curated edition, timestamped below; it changes only by a new dated edition.