BIS (Bank for International Settlements) just published a report on circular financing among AI companies.

Over half the money flowing into AI companies comes from other AI companies: between 2021 and 2025, peers supplied 55.2% of AI firms' incoming investment value, while AI investors sent 28.7% of their own deal value to AI targets.

Circular deals are rare but big: only 16.1% of AI-to-AI deals involved firms that also buy from or sell to each other, yet they held 46.4% of the money. That figure is partly inflated, because an entire funding round counts as circular if just 1 of its AI investors also trades with the company.

Chip, cloud and infrastructure suppliers are the investor in 73% of circular ties, and in 64% of all such ties the investor also sells to the firm it funds. Data tool and model makers rarely invest this way, since their products are more interchangeable.

AI is unusually suited to these deals: suppliers can track customers' compute use, chips and data centres are custom-built, few firms make critical tools such as photolithography machines, and capital needs are too big for normal lenders. In AI compute and cloud, 15.2% of supplier-customer ties also involve financing, versus just 3.3% with equity stakes in a broad 2006 US study.

Some AI sales are paid for by the sellers themselves, because money a supplier invests in a customer partly returns as the supplier's revenue. Lucent and Nortel did this in the late 1990s, then lost money on the loans and lost the sales when the telecom firms they funded stalled.

A supplier that invests in its customer can lose twice: if the customer struggles, both the stake and the future orders shrink. Because these deals involve a few giant suppliers, 1 shock could spread through sales and finance at the same time.

Much of this risk is hidden: many AI firms are private, deals mix cash with long-term purchase promises, and pledges to cover any fall in the value of chips and data centre equipment stay off the books until a downturn forces payment. Because these firms span many sectors and countries, no single regulator sees the full picture, and the research names no companies or overall dollar total.