In part one I laid out the two numbers that make this whole AI buildout feel like a dare. Big Tech spending around $725 billion in a single year, and JP Morgan's math saying the industry needs $650 billion in fresh revenue every year, forever, just to earn a 10 percent return. If you have not read that one, start there, because it sets up the stakes.
This is the half where I stop describing the bet and start poking at whether it holds.
The money that keeps going in circles
Here is where the bubble comparison gets sharp.
A cluster of the biggest names in AI are investing in each other in ways that make demand look larger than it might actually be. Nvidia has committed money to OpenAI. OpenAI commits enormous sums to cloud providers like Oracle. Those providers turn around and buy Nvidia chips to build the capacity. Amazon invests in Anthropic, which runs heavily on Amazon's own cloud. By 2026, analysts had counted more than $800 billion of these interlocking arrangements.
