Since Nvidia agreed last month to invest $100 billion in its customer OpenAI, investors and analysts who follow artificial intelligence have awakened to that industry’s circularity.

Nvidia puts money into OpenAI. OpenAI and its data center partners buy chips from Nvidia. Other circles encompass Microsoft, Oracle, and the data center firm CoreWeave.

The circles remind some on Wall Street of the wash trades between venture capital-backed start-ups before the first internet bubble burst 20 years ago—or the guy who asks you to lend him a $20 bill so he can buy you a beer. AI skeptics are chortling.

Amid the scoffing, Morgan Stanley analyst Todd Castagno mapped the AI ecosystem’s circular flows in a Wednesday note. Just tracing the companies surrounding OpenAI makes a tangled picture.

Castagno and his colleagues are confident the AI deals among these companies are real. As Morgan Stanley’s lead accounting and valuation analyst, Castagno believes that clear reporting of these numbers is crucial for knowing AI’s real demand.

Castagno pored over the financial filings of AI players—and concluded they need to disclose more about the nature of their interrelationships. 「Increasingly complex transactions make it challenging to evaluate how demand for AI is developing and increase risk around AI’s success,」 he wrote.

「You need disclosure about how all this works,」 Castagno told Barron’s. Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI. The companies share in each other’s revenues, which include sales to each other. Yet Microsoft hasn’t disclosed what portion is shared, or whether Microsoft nets its reported revenue numbers for those of OpenAI. When revenue flows both ways, gross sales numbers can give a false impression of AI demand, Castagno says.

Microsoft’s reporting on its OpenAI dealings are just a single line in a footnote table to its income statement.

Castagno suggests that Microsoft’s shareholders might deserve more detail. Citing Microsoft’s fast-rising backlog for its Azure AI web services, Morgan Stanley projects that all of Microsoft’s Azure AI growth in the June 2026 fiscal year will come from OpenAI—and exceed $20 billion.

If Microsoft provided more clarity about its OpenAI accounts, the move would actually boost the multiple that investors give Microsoft stock, says Castagno.

Microsoft said it accounts for transactions with OpenAI in the same way as with other companies. OpenAI is private and owes no public disclosure. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Circular money flows similarly connect other AI players. Nvidia sells chips to Oracle, which supplies data center capacity to Nvidia investee OpenAI. Oracle hasn’t broken out these growing money flows in its financials.

Nvidia is also an investor in the AI data center operator CoreWeave, and is paying billions to CoreWeave for computing capacity. At the same time, CoreWeave will put more than half of its $20 billion-plus of capital spending this year into Nvidia hardware, Morgan Stanley estimates.

Oracle said it has disclosed as much detail as it needs to. CoreWeave didn’t answer Barron’s accounting questions. Asked on CNBC Wednesday about Nvidia’s investments in its customers, the AI chipmaker’s CEO Jensen Huang said that AI software and data centers are great, once-in-a-generation investment opportunities.

Accounting questions might seem strategically trivial to AI company CEOs and investors. But if AI is making us rich, it would be nice to know by how much.