Silicon Valley has always been a small world.

Most of us are just out here hiking the Dish while talking to our chatbots or, laptops in hand, brushing shoulders with fellow Patagonia-clad dorks at the Rosewood. (Though the Patagonia-to-Loro-Piana vest migration is well underway, and frankly, I’m here for it.)

But lately, it’s not just the people aggressively doing loops around Sand Hill Road trying to get their steps in. It’s their money too.

Nvidia just partnered with top Wall Street firms to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure — helping create financing for companies that will ultimately need… a lot of Nvidia compute.

Alphabet committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic, which in turn is expanding its use of Google infrastructure to up to one million TPUs — an expansion worth tens of billions of dollars in itself.

Amazon committed up to $33 billion to Anthropic and $50 billion to OpenAI. And, as if on cue, Anthropic has committed more than $100 billion over the next decade to AWS, while OpenAI has signed up for 2 gigawatts of Amazon Trainium capacity.

If you’d prefer to watch me explain this — including an unnecessarily committed rendition of Circle of Life — here’s the video:

The thing I found most interesting while brewing this blend isn’t that any of this is inherently groundbreaking or particularly shady.

It’s that AI has become so catastrophically expensive to build that the lines between investor, supplier, lender and customer are starting to blur. Everyone is funding everyone, buying from everyone and, in several cases, getting richer off everyone else.

That can create a very real flywheel while demand keeps growing. But I can’t help but wonder: when the music finally stops, how many butts are actually getting into chairs?

So when we talk about trillions of dollars pouring into AI, the more interesting question becomes: How much genuinely new economic activity is being created — and how much money is simply circulating inside an increasingly interconnected ecosystem?

Welcome to the circle of Silicon Valley economic life. 🎶