The money does leave the room — it gets converted into physical infrastructure that's increasingly rationed. Capital is not the constraint anymore.
Dominion Energy can't serve new data center load in Loudoun County until 2028. NERC flagged grid emergency risk across most of CONUS. Phoenix is in active water rationing while hosting 47 hyperscale facilities. Helium supply (45% Qatar, used in EUV cooling) took real hits in 2026.
Even if Google funds Anthropic, who funds the new transformers, the grid interconnect queue position, the water permit reviews? That part of the cycle isn't circular — it's hitting physics.
Capital is fungible. Substations aren't.
Yup. Even if Anthropic spends that $40B back at Google and thus the money ends up there, Google is still out of $40B worth of compute or whatever the profit margin is on that.
It's why eating at your own restaurant is cheaper, but still not free.
