Who is actually paying whom in AI?
The biggest deals in AI — chip orders, infrastructure commitments, equity stakes — flow back through the same handful of companies. From the outside it looks like industry growth; from inside it can look like capital that returns to its source. We wanted to quantify that.
Built a force-directed graph of 28 companies and 90 deals, scored every cycle by length and dollar weight, and surfaced the most circular structures. NVIDIA centers as the highest-degree hub; OpenAI and Microsoft anchor the strongest bidirectional cycles. Three scores summarize each node: Loop, Cycle, Hub.
The paper is up on SSRN. The graph is the deliverable — the structure tells the story faster than the prose can.
Quarterly updates as new deals close. The conclusion isn't the headline — it's the trend line.