Circular financing scale

concentrating75/95leading

1What this measures

Cumulative signed vendor-financing commitments between AI-stack suppliers and their lab customers (equity stakes, guarantees, take-or-pay contracts, backstops), from filings and company announcements; derived metric circular_commitments_total. Letters of intent, talks and self-reported aggregates are on the ledger but excluded from the total.

Why it matters. When Nvidia guarantees OpenAI's leases, Microsoft's backlog is half OpenAI, and Amazon funds the customer that commits to AWS, revenue and capital are the same dollars going round the stack. The ledger is where the circularity is filed.

Proxy types: capital_flow
Unit: USD
Cadence: quarterly

2How we track this

derived metric circular_commitments_total (formula in the semantic layer)

Direction over 3 periods, dead-band $20.0B; higher = concentrating.

Three quarters; moves under $20B are one small deal. A growing cumulative total concentrates the stack's risk in a few counterparties.

Applied to metric:circular_commitments_total.

3Tracker interpretation

Over a trillion dollars of circular commitments in a year, most of it filed. The Nvidia 5-year CDS (on the ledger) is the market's stress read on it.

4Evidence

Direction over the last 3 periods; the band is ±$20.0B around the window's first point. Higher reads concentrating.

Latest point

$903Bas of 2026-08-17(14 obs)

Value the bands apply to

$903Bas of 2026-08-17(14 obs)

14 observations. Hollow points are disputed (see counterevidence). Every point links to its observation.

Derived rows (6)

as of	value	inputs
2026-08-17	$903B	obs:0020effe obs:15768aa0 obs:15f854e5+11 more
2026-04-20	$798B	obs:15768aa0 obs:15f854e5 obs:47769aec+10 more
2026-03-31	$673B	obs:15768aa0 obs:15f854e5 obs:47769aec+8 more
2025-11-18	$641B	obs:15768aa0 obs:15f854e5 obs:5b741dc1+6 more
2025-09-25	$346B	obs:15768aa0 obs:15f854e5 obs:bb4e6019+2 more
2024-11-22	$8.0B	obs:bb4e6019

5Status and reasoning

concentratingsince 2026-09-10 · claude-initial-seed

Cumulative signed circular commitments (equity, guarantees, take-or-pay, backstops; LOIs, talks and self-reported aggregates excluded): Dec 2025 $641B, Mar 2026 $673B, Jun 2026 $798B, Sep 2026 $903B. Rising by far more than the $20B dead band each quarter; the largest single items are OpenAI's $300B Oracle contract (reported), $250B Azure commitment (Microsoft blog), Nvidia's $105B lease guarantee (10-Q) and Anthropic's $100B+ AWS commitment (Amazon). Initial seed.

6Timeline notes

2026-08-17 · $903Bas of 2026-08-17(14 obs)
2026-04-20 · $798Bas of 2026-04-20(13 obs)
2026-03-31 · $673Bas of 2026-03-31(11 obs)
2025-11-18 · $641Bas of 2025-11-18(9 obs)
2025-09-25 · $346Bas of 2025-09-25(5 obs)
2024-11-22 · $8.0Bas of 2024-11-22

7Counterevidence

What cuts against this reading

Commitments are not cash; "up to" amounts and ten-year floors are counted at face; equity in a customer is only circular if the customer spends it with the investor.

8Update history

2026-09-10unmeasured to concentratingconf — → 75 · claude-initial-seed
Cumulative signed circular commitments (equity, guarantees, take-or-pay, backstops; LOIs, talks and self-reported aggregates excluded): Dec 2025 $641B, Mar 2026 $673B, Jun 2026 $798B, Sep 2026 $903B. Rising by far more than the $20B dead band each quarter; the largest single items are OpenAI's $300B Oracle contract (reported), $250B Azure commitment (Microsoft blog), Nvidia's $105B lease guarantee (10-Q) and Anthropic's $100B+ AWS commitment (Amazon). Initial seed.
obs:0020effe obs:15768aa0 obs:15f854e5 obs:47769aec obs:5b741dc1 obs:86bf3cb0+8 more

9Confidence

75 / 95 — good evidence, some ambiguity

Confidence is independent of status: 90–95 multiple strong independent sources; 70–89 good evidence, some ambiguity; 50–69 mixed or hard to operationalise; below 50 limited or vague.

10Related

Cloud backlog (remaining performance obligations) concentrating
Rent concentration in semiconductors concentrating
Bottlenecks #61 (Narayanan & Kapoor's list)