New Delhi, Nov. 10 -- Around a month ago, I wrote that the financial community is sounding alarm bells on speculative artificial intelligence (AI) growth. On 3 November, OpenAI inked a $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services, committing to run a vast portion of its workloads on AWS infrastructure over the next seven years. To the casual observer, this looks like another straightforward cloud services contract.

In reality, it has become increasingly common in the AI ecosystem to have circular revenue loops that bind AI platforms to their suppliers in ways that blur the line between investment, infrastructure and demand forecasting. The New York Times counts seven such transactions at Open AI in a recent article (shorturl.at/ucOqY)...