Morgan Stanley has put together a chart illustrating the funding flows within the OpenAI ecosystem.
Honestly, at first glance, it looks like a spider web. But if you trace the lines, you’ll uncover an incredibly clever business loop.
Let’s start with the most critical connection:
Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI. What does OpenAI do with that money? They turn around and spend $250 billion on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. Then Microsoft takes that money to buy $45 billion worth of GPUs from Nvidia.
Did you catch that? The money Microsoft invested comes back around— not only does it return, but it also brings back a share of OpenAI's revenue.
This isn’t just investment; it’s a blueprint for a money-printing machine.
Now, look at Oracle. They invested $1 billion in OpenAI and then landed a $300 billion data center infrastructure contract. Making 300 times your investment? That’s even more profitable than venture capital!
Coreweave is even more fascinating. Microsoft invested $10 billion in them, OpenAI signed a $22.4 billion procurement contract with them, and Amazon gave them a $38.5 billion data center lease. This GPU cloud computing company derives nearly all its revenue from these major players swapping money around.
Ultimately, all this money flows to two primary destinations: Nvidia and data centers.
Nvidia receives $45 billion from Microsoft, $6.3 billion from Coreweave, and another $22.7 billion from data center leasing companies. Almost every funding chain ends with Nvidia cashing in.
So, what’s the real story behind this diagram?
In this arms race for AI, money doesn’t flow in a straight line from A to B; it circulates within a closed ecosystem. Big companies invest in each other, procure from one another, and share revenues. You invest in me, I buy your services, then I purchase chips from him, and he takes the profits to invest in more companies.
To be frank, this game is completely off-limits for smaller companies. The entry ticket starts at hundreds of millions.
But looking at it the other way, this also explains why the stock prices of these companies keep rising. They’re not just burning cash; they’re actively generating income for each other.
Every dollar that circulates in this system multiplies into several dollars of revenue.
This is the true winning game of the AI era.
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