Committed AI compute divided by outside funded cash — the desk's flagship measurement of circular financing, from primary filings. 15.5× est., 2026Q2.
The recycling ratio measures how much committed AI compute the core labs’ disclosed outside funding actually supports. The numerator is disclosed compute commitments — ~$539B in total, of which ~$395B walks to a primary SEC filing accession; the remaining ~$145B is corroborated from company disclosures and reporting and carries a lower confidence label in the ledger. On the strictly primary-filed numerator the ratio reads ~11.3×. The denominator is outside cash actually funded — not announced, not committed, funded. When the ratio is high, the build-out is financing itself in a loop: vendors funding customers whose commitments come back as the vendors’ own backlog.
The figure is labeled an estimate because the denominator depends on which instruments count as arm’s-length outside funding — the papers walk that judgment edge by edge, every accession number cited.