Nvidia, OpenAI and the AI Money Loop

What if part of the AI boom is the same money making several laps? In this clip from The AI Money Loop, we trace how cash moves between Nvidia, OpenAI and the cloud companies that rent out computing power, and why that circle can make demand look bigger than it may really be.

The loop starts with the chip supplier. In September 2025, Nvidia and OpenAI unveiled a plan for Nvidia to invest as much as $100 billion as OpenAI deployed 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems. That larger plan never closed. Nvidia instead put $30 billion into OpenAI as part of a $110 billion funding round announced on Feb. 27, 2026, and CEO Jensen Huang later said the full $100 billion was probably off the table.

OpenAI, in turn, has committed huge sums to renting computing capacity. It has agreed to buy roughly $300 billion of computing power from Oracle over about five years beginning in 2027, and its contracts with CoreWeave total about $22.4 billion. Those cloud providers then fill their data centers with Nvidia chips, which sends a large share of the money back to the company that started the chain.

Nvidia’s ties to CoreWeave run deeper still. It invested another $2 billion in CoreWeave stock in January 2026, lifting its stake to about 11%, and a 2025 agreement worth at least $6.3 billion obligates Nvidia to buy any cloud capacity CoreWeave cannot sell to other customers through April 2032.

For investors, these deals do not mean the demand is fake, but they could make it harder to separate outside spending from money that is circulating among a few closely linked partners. If funding for any one link tightens, the strain may travel around the whole loop. Nvidia shares closed at $233.95 on Oct. 2, near their record high, which shows how much confidence the market still places in that chain.
Watch the full episode, The AI Money Loop, on YouTube.