Investing in AI

Deep dive · vendor financing

The AI money loop

Some of the money in the AI build-out now runs in a loop. Suppliers invest in their customers, lend to them, guarantee their leases, promise to buy back capacity they can’t sell, and hand them shares through warrants. We found 25 such links in 9 companies’ SEC filings. This page maps them and quotes each one in the filer’s own words.

of equity investments Nvidia reports in its ecosystem, with $25B more committed
$99B
of equity investments Nvidia reports in its ecosystem, with $25B more committed
cap on Nvidia’s guarantees of data-center leases for OpenAI
$105B
cap on Nvidia’s guarantees of data-center leases for OpenAI
of Microsoft’s fiscal 2026 revenue came from OpenAI, a company it part-owns
$24.1B
of Microsoft’s fiscal 2026 revenue came from OpenAI, a company it part-owns
of gains Amazon booked in six months, mostly on its Anthropic stake
$62.8B
of gains Amazon booked in six months, mostly on its Anthropic stake

When the seller helps pay

Every industry that builds expensive infrastructure ahead of demand eventually meets the same problem: the customers who most want the product can’t yet afford it. The usual answer is for the seller to help pay. Carmakers finance cars, aircraft makers arrange plane leases, and equipment makers lend to the telecom carriers that buy their gear. It is called vendor financing, and it is often sensible: the seller knows the product, wants the volume, and can afford to wait.

The AI build-out has its own version, larger and more varied than most. The map below shows every link we have found that a filing states as fact, with a number on each edge matching the quoted list further down. Arrows point the way money or credit flows: from the company that invests, lends, guarantees or commits, to the one that receives it. Revenue links point from the customer that pays to the company that reports the revenue.

Who funds whom: every link a filing states as fact

Arrows run in the direction of money or credit. Numbers match the quoted list below; dashed boxes are private companies or groups.

  • Equity investment
  • Credit or guarantee
  • Purchase commitment
  • Reported revenue
  • Customer warrant
  • Power contract
Microsoft → OpenAI: $11.9B funded of $13.0B committed1OpenAI → Microsoft: $24.1B of Microsoft revenue in FY20262Amazon → Anthropic: $8.0B in convertible notes, 2023–20253Amazon → Anthropic: $5.0B in Series G preferred, 20264Amazon → Anthropic: Up to $20B facility, released as compute is delivered5Anthropic → Amazon: Commitment to AWS expanded by more than $100B over 10 years6Amazon → OpenAI: $50B of preferred stock: $15B invested, $35B committed7OpenAI → Amazon: $38B AWS commitment, expanded by $100B over 8 years8Amazon → Anthropic: $5.0B in Series H preferred, drawn from the facility9OpenAI → CoreWeave: Up to $11.9B through October 2030 (first agreement)10Nvidia → OpenAI: Lease guarantees for OpenAI, capped at $105B11Nvidia → Nvidia’s private holdings: $99B invested, $25B more committed12Nvidia → AI cloud partners: $36B of cloud capacity it has agreed to buy back13Nvidia → Nvidia’s suppliers: $279B of supply and capacity commitments14Nvidia → CoreWeave: $2.0B share purchase, January 202615Microsoft → CoreWeave: 67% of CoreWeave’s 2025 revenue16Meta → CoreWeave: Up to $21.0B through 203217OpenAI → CoreWeave: Up to $6.5B through May 2031 (one order form)18AMD → OpenAI: Warrant for up to 160M AMD shares at $0.0119AMD → Meta: Warrant for up to 160M AMD shares at $0.0120HPE → Oracle: Warrant for up to 4.2M HPE shares, tied to networking in Oracle’s AI data centers21Meta → Meta’s data-center ventures: $41.5B of residual value guarantees, $68.4B maximum exposure22Meta → Third-party clouds: $454.5B of non-cancelable commitments, mostly cloud capacity23Microsoft → Constellation: 20-year PPA for a restarted nuclear plant24Meta → Vistra: 2,609 MW of nuclear power under 20-year PPAs25MicrosoftOpenAIAmazonAnthropicCoreWeaveNvidiaNvidia’s private holdingsAI cloud partnersNvidia’s suppliersMetaAMDHPEOracleMeta’s data-center venturesThird-party cloudsConstellationVistra

Source: 10-K, 10-Q and 20-F filings on SEC EDGAR, read October 30, 2026. A link appears only if the filing’s own sentence, quoted below, contains its figures. Line width grows with the dollar amount where one is stated.

Show the numbers
Disclosed financing links
#From → toKindWhat the filing says
1Microsoft → OpenAIEquity investment$11.9B funded of $13.0B committed
2OpenAI → MicrosoftReported revenue$24.1B of Microsoft revenue in FY2026
3Amazon → AnthropicEquity investment$8.0B in convertible notes, 2023–2025
4Amazon → AnthropicEquity investment$5.0B in Series G preferred, 2026
5Amazon → AnthropicCredit or guaranteeUp to $20B facility, released as compute is delivered
6Anthropic → AmazonPurchase commitmentCommitment to AWS expanded by more than $100B over 10 years
7Amazon → OpenAIEquity investment$50B of preferred stock: $15B invested, $35B committed
8OpenAI → AmazonPurchase commitment$38B AWS commitment, expanded by $100B over 8 years
9Amazon → AnthropicEquity investment$5.0B in Series H preferred, drawn from the facility
10OpenAI → CoreWeavePurchase commitmentUp to $11.9B through October 2030 (first agreement)
11Nvidia → OpenAICredit or guaranteeLease guarantees for OpenAI, capped at $105B
12Nvidia → Nvidia’s private holdingsEquity investment$99B invested, $25B more committed
13Nvidia → AI cloud partnersPurchase commitment$36B of cloud capacity it has agreed to buy back
14Nvidia → Nvidia’s suppliersPurchase commitment$279B of supply and capacity commitments
15Nvidia → CoreWeaveEquity investment$2.0B share purchase, January 2026
16Microsoft → CoreWeaveReported revenue67% of CoreWeave’s 2025 revenue
17Meta → CoreWeavePurchase commitmentUp to $21.0B through 2032
18OpenAI → CoreWeavePurchase commitmentUp to $6.5B through May 2031 (one order form)
19AMD → OpenAICustomer warrantWarrant for up to 160M AMD shares at $0.01
20AMD → MetaCustomer warrantWarrant for up to 160M AMD shares at $0.01
21HPE → OracleCustomer warrantWarrant for up to 4.2M HPE shares, tied to networking in Oracle’s AI data centers
22Meta → Meta’s data-center venturesCredit or guarantee$41.5B of residual value guarantees, $68.4B maximum exposure
23Meta → Third-party cloudsPurchase commitment$454.5B of non-cancelable commitments, mostly cloud capacity
24Microsoft → ConstellationPower contract20-year PPA for a restarted nuclear plant
25Meta → VistraPower contract2,609 MW of nuclear power under 20-year PPAs

Six kinds of link

Equity investment
An equity investment buys shares or convertible notes in a customer. The investor shares the upside if the customer succeeds, and the customer gets cash it can spend on the investor’s products.
Credit or guarantee
Credit means a loan, a credit facility or a guarantee of someone else’s obligations. It lets a customer commit to more than its own balance sheet could support. The supplier takes the risk if the customer can’t pay.
Purchase commitment
A purchase commitment is a contract to buy capacity or supply for years. When a supplier commits to buy back cloud capacity from its own customer, the customer’s risk of empty data centers moves to the supplier.
Reported revenue
A revenue link is revenue one company reports from the other. It matters most when the payer is also an investee, because the same dollars can show up as an investment going out and revenue coming back.
Customer warrant
A customer warrant gives a buyer the right to acquire the seller’s shares for almost nothing, usually as it hits purchase milestones. It is a discount on the product paid in stock rather than cash.
Power contract
A power contract commits a buyer to take a generator’s output for decades. These are ordinary commercial contracts, shown because they let generators finance plants on the strength of a data-center customer.

The loops worth understanding

Nvidia: the seller that also invests, backstops and guarantees

Nvidia is the largest seller in the stack, and its filings show it has become one of the largest financiers too. It reports $99 billion of equity investments in its ecosystem, with $25 billion more committed. It has a model in which AI clouds buy its systems while Nvidia commits to cloud service agreements with them, capacity those clouds can sell to others if they find buyers, totalling $36 billion. In effect Nvidia promises to be the customer of last resort for part of the capacity it sells.

It has also guaranteed leases for OpenAI at a 4.25-gigawatt campus in Ohio, with its obligation capped at $105 billion and shrinking as OpenAI pays its rent. And CoreWeave, whose GPUs are all Nvidia’s, reports that Nvidia bought $2.0 billion of its shares in January 2026.

Each of these is defensible on its own: Nvidia has the cash, and helping customers buy sooner protects its lead. Together they mean part of Nvidia’s reported demand depends on Nvidia’s own balance sheet. If AI capacity ever ran ahead of what end users would pay for, the backstops and guarantees are where the losses would surface first.

Amazon and Anthropic: a credit line that opens as compute is delivered

Amazon invested $8.0 billion in Anthropic convertible notes between 2023 and 2025 and $10.0 billion in its preferred stock in the second quarter of 2026: $5.0 billion of Series G and $5.0 billion of Series H. Anthropic, for its part, expanded its commitment to AWS by more than $100 billion over ten years, including contractual obligations tied to the performance of Amazon’s own Trainium chips.

The detail that matters is the new $20 billion financing facility. Nothing can be drawn at the start; amounts become available as AWS reaches delivery milestones for compute capacity. In other words, Amazon will lend Anthropic money as Amazon delivers the computing Anthropic has committed to buy. That is vendor financing in its plainest form. Amazon has already used the facility once: its $5.0 billion Series H investment was made under it, which cut the amount still available to $15.0 billion.

The stake also moves Amazon’s earnings. Amazon reports $50.5 billion of upward adjustments to private-company investments in the second quarter of 2026, primarily its Anthropic preferred stock, against $27.5B of operating income for the whole company in the same quarter. Those gains sit below operating income, but they are in net income and earnings per share.

Amazon and OpenAI: the same playbook, a second lab

In the first half of 2026 Amazon did with OpenAI what it had done with Anthropic. It invested $15.0 billion in OpenAI’s Series C preferred stock and committed to buy $35.0 billion more, and after June 30 it invested the remaining $21.3 billion, so the full $50 billion is now in. In the same period OpenAI expanded an existing $38.0 billion commitment to AWS by $100.0 billion over eight years, again including obligations tied to the performance of AWS’s own chips.

Amazon is therefore a large shareholder in both leading independent AI labs and a large supplier of computing to both. Its 10-Q reports that its private-company stakes, primarily Anthropic and OpenAI, were carried at $122.3 billion at June 30, 2026, up from $16.2 billion six months earlier. Most of that increase is gains recorded as each lab raised money at a higher price, not cash Amazon has received.

Microsoft and OpenAI: investor, supplier and landlord’s customer

Microsoft owns roughly a quarter of OpenAI on an as-converted basis. It reports total funding commitments of $13.0 billion, of which $11.9 billion has been funded, and revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI of $24.1 billion in fiscal 2026, about 7% of Microsoft’s revenue. In one year Microsoft booked about twice as much revenue from OpenAI as it has funded into OpenAI in total.

The loop has more than two points. CoreWeave reports that Microsoft supplied 67% of its 2025 revenue, and that OpenAI has committed up to $6.5 billion under one order form, so OpenAI’s computing is bought both from Microsoft and from a company Microsoft itself rents capacity from. Nvidia, in turn, invests in CoreWeave and guarantees OpenAI’s leases.

Microsoft also reports that net gains from its OpenAI investments raised fiscal 2026 net income by $5.0 billion, or $0.67 a share. It excludes them from its adjusted figures, which is the right way to read them.

Warrants: discounts paid in stock

AMD has issued warrants to OpenAI and Meta, each for up to 160 million AMD shares at an exercise price of a penny, tied to purchases of its accelerators. HPE issued Oracle a warrant for up to about 4.2 million shares in connection with deploying HPE networking in Oracle’s AI data centers. Marvell disclosed a warrant to an unnamed customer in fiscal 2025.

A warrant like this is a price cut that existing shareholders pay for through dilution rather than the company paying in cash. It wins orders against a stronger rival, and it can be worth it. But it means the reported revenue was bought partly with equity, and investors should count the warrant’s value as a cost of that revenue.

Meta: guarantees instead of ownership

Meta builds two data-center campuses, in Louisiana and Texas, through joint ventures it doesn’t consolidate, so their debt isn’t on Meta’s balance sheet. Meta leases the campuses back and has given the ventures residual value guarantees: if the buildings are worth less than a set amount at the end of the lease, Meta makes up the difference. It puts its maximum exposure at $68.4 billion, of which $41.5 billion is the guarantees.

This is a financing choice rather than a loop between suppliers and customers, but it belongs on the map because it shows how far the build-out now relies on commitments that don’t appear as debt.

  • Amazon: “The upward adjustments relating to equity investments in private companies of $50.5 billion in Q2 2026 and $62.8 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026 reflect observable changes in prices, primarily from our nonvoting preferred stock in Anthropic.” 10-Q, July 31, 2026
  • Microsoft: “Current year net income and diluted EPS were positively impacted by net gains from investments in OpenAI, which resulted in an increase in net income and diluted EPS of $5.0 billion and $0.67, respectively.” 10-K, July 29, 2026

Why it matters to an investor

  • Revenue quality. When a supplier funds a customer’s purchases, some of the supplier’s revenue is its own money coming back. That revenue is real under the accounting rules, but it is less reliable as evidence of independent demand. The test is how much of a company’s growth comes from customers it finances, invests in or guarantees.
  • Concentration. The links cluster around a handful of private AI labs: OpenAI and Anthropic appear again and again. Their ability to pay depends on their own revenue and on continued investor funding. A problem at one of them would reach several listed companies at once, through revenue, backlog, guarantees and investment marks together.
  • Earnings quality. Investment gains on stakes in customers now move net income by billions of dollars a quarter. They are non-cash and can reverse. Compare operating income, which excludes them, with net income, which doesn’t.
  • Hidden leverage. Guarantees, capacity buy-backs and lease commitments don’t appear as debt, but in a downturn they behave like it. The maximum exposures the companies disclose are the numbers to track.

History rhymes, up to a point

The obvious comparison is the telecom build-out of the late 1990s, when equipment makers lent heavily to start-up carriers so they could buy more equipment, and many of those loans were never repaid once the carriers failed. The parallel is real but limited. Today’s financiers are among the most profitable companies in history, the main borrowers are funded by large private investors rather than junk bonds, and the demand for AI services is growing in the cloud revenue the filings report.

What carries over is the mechanism. Vendor financing makes demand look stronger than end customers alone would make it, and it ties the supplier’s fortunes to its customer’s. It works while the end market grows into the capacity. It goes wrong when it is used to sustain orders after end demand has slowed. The filings won’t say which is happening, but they will show whether the financing keeps growing faster than the revenue it supports.

How to check a company yourself

  1. Search a company’s 10-K and 10-Q for “warrant”, “guarantee”, “non-marketable”, “equity method” and “related party”. That is where these arrangements are disclosed.
  2. Compare investment gains with operating income. Gains on stakes in customers are real but non-cash and reversible.
  3. Look for customer concentration (any customer above 10% of revenue must be disclosed) and check whether that customer is also an investee.
  4. Read the maximum-exposure tables for unconsolidated ventures and guarantees, and track them quarter by quarter.
  5. Ask whether backlog depends on a customer that is itself funded by investors. Backlog is only as good as the customer’s ability to pay.

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Questions about AI vendor financing

What is circular financing in AI?

It describes arrangements in which a supplier helps fund its own customer’s purchases: investing in the customer, lending to it, guaranteeing its leases, agreeing to buy back capacity it can’t sell, or granting it shares through warrants. The money the supplier puts in comes back as revenue when the customer buys its products. The arrangements are legal and disclosed, but they make demand look stronger than end customers alone would.

Is vendor financing a sign of an AI bubble?

Not on its own. Vendor financing is common in capital-intensive industries and can be sensible when the end market is growing. It becomes a warning sign when it grows faster than the revenue it supports, or when it is used to keep orders flowing after end demand slows. Watching the size of guarantees, investments and capacity buy-backs relative to revenue is the way to tell.

How much has Nvidia invested in its customers?

Nvidia’s latest 10-Q reports equity investments of $99 billion in its ecosystem and $25 billion of further equity investment commitments, plus $36 billion of commitments to buy cloud capacity from AI cloud partners that purchase its products, and guarantees of OpenAI data-center leases capped at $105 billion. It does not break the equity investments down by company.

How is Amazon financing Anthropic?

Amazon invested $8.0 billion in Anthropic convertible notes from 2023 to 2025 and $10.0 billion in its preferred stock in 2026, and has agreed a financing facility of up to $20 billion that becomes available as AWS delivers compute capacity ($5.0 billion of it has been used). Anthropic has expanded its commitment to AWS by more than $100 billion over ten years.

How much revenue does Microsoft get from OpenAI?

Microsoft reported $24.1 billion of revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments, for its fiscal year ended June 30, 2026. It discloses this because OpenAI is an equity-method investee and therefore a related party.

Why do chipmakers give customers warrants?

A warrant with a near-zero exercise price is effectively a discount paid in shares: the customer earns the right to buy stock cheaply as it hits purchase milestones. It helps a challenger win large orders against a dominant rival. Investors should treat the warrants’ value as a cost of the revenue they help win, since existing shareholders bear it through dilution.

Research and education, not investment advice: nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Figures come from companies’ SEC filings as reported; companies named were chosen because they show how the stack works, not as a view on their shares.