“Inside the $300B AI loop powering Wall Street.”
OpenAI’s $300 million robot to be is more than a tech story It’s a financial feedback loop that ties chips, money and power into one self reinforcing system. What exacerbates the system is that, even as ARM pitches itself as specialized, it has forged a sprawling network of partners in AMD, Broad comm, Oracle and energy suppliers building a circular machine where every part feeds the next chips produce compute; compute drives valuation; valuation opens credit; credit pays for more chips. It is a flywheel of silicon and finance that turns faster as confidence builds one that could spin horribly in reverse if demand or energy flags.
Fundamentally, OpenAI’s scheme bakes in tens of millions of AI accelerators until 2029 that comprises about 16 gigawatts of compute capacity representing more computational power than the energy consumption levels of small nations. AMD will alone supply six gigawatts via its Instinct line, and sweetening the pot are stock warrants which tie hardware delivery to equity appreciation. Broadcom will commit over ten gigawatts of custom silicon designed for energy efficiency. And all that infrastructure leads to the Stargate data centers five giant U.S. locations that together will create an industrial base for artificial cognition. But below the grand vision is a house of mirrors of finance.
Nvidia has a stake in CoreWeave, a cloud provider whose contracts with OpenAI have exceeded $22 billion. These relationships Among other things, these supplier vendor vendors and their own sources of demand receive and use funds to perpetuate valuations for stock. Bloomberg estimates supplier linked financing to be as high as $100 billion. The result is a “circular economy of belief” in which risk, equity and production are hopelessly interlinked, to the point that it’s not really clear where the exposure is. When financing, valuation and supply all mirror one another it’s not built on folly but symmetry, and bubbles form unnoticed.
The survival of the system is determined by three gates: use, energy, and cost. Utilization wonders if enterprises are really going to use this compute; without workloads, billions in GPUs will never get warm. Wall Street is already shaking, more than 50 per cent of fund managers believe AI is a bubble and tech heavy indexes wobble from overinflated expectations. Energy is the second test. By 2030, the data centers that drove it all could consume 14 percent of U.S. electricity and by that year be responsible for almost 1 in every 7 watts used globally.The Internet’s data centers may already consume some 300 million megawatt hours’ worth of electricity, I was told. And without abundant, inexpensive power they can count on, the AI boom sputters. The third gate is cost: Broadcom’s chips have to drive down the cost of performance per watt significantly if AI is going to remain economically viable.
( F = low efficiency ) and not exceeded by efficiency, long before models reach maturity margins are gone. Regulation looms in the background. The UK’s CMA passes Microsoft’s connections with OpenAI, but we won’t need to redefine partnership and control that much: financial ties have equity interlocks; in the future capital-style contracts will blend control-and-partnership ever tighter into close review lines. The bubble metaphor works but only so well. Sometimes that comes about as a bubble accelerates process, condensing decades’ worth of innovation into years for the price of fragility. If credit stress doesn’t rise before OpenAI’s machine drives costs down further, it may actually be more of a bridge to a new industrial age than a trap for speculators. By then (late 2026), when we will have Broadcom systems and AMD deliveries, reality will hold the loop. But if energy flows, workloads fill and costs drop, the $300 billion machine spins a self-perpetuating cycle of growth. If not, the same system that generated value could unwind, taking down chipmakers, utilities and markets subjected to AI’s power-hungry ascent. Whether it becomes a circle of progress or a spiral of collapse depends on the three ratios power expended, demand fulfilled and cost mitigated. Stack, now capital’s twin, has rewired the economy and its hum reverberates in every circuit of Wall Street.
