Big Tech’s $2 trillion AI gold rush is hiding a structural flaw.
Critics say the giants are quietly paying themselves through their own cloud bills, igniting fresh AI bubble fears that increasingly echo the dot-com era
Latest corporate filings show OpenAI and Anthropic alone anchor over half of the roughly $2 trillion in future cloud commitments held by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. This leaves four trillion-dollar companies leaning on two unprofitable startups. The Cloud Loop That Pays Itself Critics call the mechanism a round-trip funding loop.
A tech giant writes a billion-dollar check to an AI startup. The contract then forces that same money straight back, in the form of cloud rent. The cash never leaves the building.