The entire AI boom may be built on false revenue.

Only OpenAI and Anthropic account for more than half of the entire $2 trillion in cloud-service future orders held by Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon.
The tech giants have an invisible clause in their investments in AI companies: the amount they invest is used by startups to rent the giants’ servers. This process is mandatory. In essence, the investment funds move from left hand to right—but after the process is completed, the financial statements of multiple parties are optimized, and the computing resources used to train the models are magically optimized multiple times within those financial statements. Yet the market interprets it as revenue growth, inflating the bubble further.
In reality, the tech giants pay themselves with their own money and package this loop of transactions as “sales.”
That’s why OpenAI’s annual cloud bill exceeds $6 billion—more than twice its actual revenue of $2.5 billion—maintained solely through this circular flow of funds.
Anthropic is running the exact same scheme.
Every time a startup secures a higher valuation in a new round of financing, the tech giants update the value of their investment in their books and treat this unrealized paper gain as direct profit.
This perfectly mirrors the warning signs before the burst of the 2001 internet bubble.
The only difference is that during the internet-bubble period, related-party swap transactions were illegal, but today’s AI loop is fully legal under current accounting rules.