And — if we put aside challenges this presents to antitrust regulators/the foundations of functioning capitalism — they are not particularly worrying. At least, they are not particularly worrying in a world where firms don’t fail. We live in a world where firms do sometimes fail.
As such, the financial links connecting what look like nice safe firms in the AI ecosystem to potentially systemically important weaker links have the potential to matter quite a lot. A new paper by Craig Nicol, Oleg Melentyev, and Charlie Callan of Sona Asset Management, best known for their massive London-based credit hedge fund, has a go at mapping the AI universe and cataloguing the interconnections between major players. The authors kindly shared the data they’d mined with Alphaville.
And we threw them into our dataviz systems to make this hot mess of a ~~cat’s cradle~~ radial network chart: Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings. We appreciate that the chart isn’t the most mobile-friendly of things, but it gives a sense as to the extent of financial connections between different entities.
Financial connections include equity, debt, lease commitments or whatever. Nodes are sized by the amount of commitments to which each is reportedly attached. So the green OpenAI blob is big (lots of commitments pouring both in and out).
But one of the tiny grey blobs representing Citadel is small (because we don’t actually have a specific number for their commitment, just reports that they were involved in a $2bn Series C equity capital raise for neocloud Nscale). Hover your pointer on a node to see where financing is coming from and where it’s going. The data covers 176 deals totalling $3.6tn, transacted between 202 entities, in the three and a half years to August 2026.
It looks like the true value of deals could be somewhat higher just because of the number of deals whose value is not disclosed. OpenAI and Anthropic are both central to the ecosystem, and have each accumulated vast commitments. We’re not saying that they’re the weak links in this web, but their lack of positive (unadjusted) earnings may mean that they warrant a little more attention.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
