At the time, the story sounded deeply suspicious: one company invests in another, the recipient uses that money to buy infrastructure from the investor or its partners, and those contracts justify even more investment and borrowing. Is this real demand, or are the same dollars simply being passed around to sustain revenue and valuations?
That remains a fair question.
But OpenAI and Broadcom have now produced Jalapeno, a specialised inference chip that OpenAI says outperforms Nvidia’s GB300 on some measures of efficiency and latency. We should be cautious about vendor benchmarks, but something real and potentially valuable has emerged from those interdependent deals.
It makes me wonder whether the circularity looks less like a scam and more like the transitional state of a new economic system.
Capital funds compute. Compute creates better machine intelligence. That intelligence helps develop and operate the next generation of chips, models and infrastructure, attracting still more capital.
Perhaps this is what it looks like when an economy begins moving from labour as its central productive input towards capital, energy and machine intelligence.
Of course, the loop cannot sustain itself merely by circulating money. It still needs energy, materials, human capability and, ultimately, genuine demand from outside the circle.
But could these circular arrangements be how the system bootstraps itself across that gap?
And if it succeeds, are we preparing for the consequences of production becoming progressively less dependent on human labour - or are we still debating it as though it were simply another technology bubble?
Originally published on LinkedIn.