They buy each other
Google pays Apple about $20B a year. Apple's iCloud runs on Google's cloud. Both are true at once.
Four of the biggest relationships in tech run both ways at once.
Google pays Apple roughly $20B a year to be Safari's default search — a figure only made public by DOJ antitrust filings — and Apple is Google's largest corporate cloud customer, because iCloud runs on Google infrastructure.
Microsoft has committed $13B to OpenAI, $11.8B funded as of March, for ~27% of it; OpenAI has committed $250B to Azure. Amazon's investment in Anthropic reached $33B in April; Anthropic has committed over $100B to AWS across ten years. Nvidia sells CoreWeave the chips, and agreed to buy $6.3B of its unsold capacity through 2032.
One pair is missing on purpose: Nvidia's announced $100B for OpenAI. Five months after the letter of intent no contract was signed, and Jensen Huang said it was never a commitment. An arc drawn for money that never moved is a picture of a press release.
None of this is improper. Vendor financing is normal — and it is also how a market can look bigger than the demand from outside it. Not financial advice.
Next: what an AI chip costs to build, and who gets paid for each part.
