Catenaa, Sunday, October 04, 2026- Nearly half of the funds in intra-AI investment deals between firms from 2021 to 2025 came from firms with commercial supply chain relationships.
A study by the Bank for International Settlements(BIS) found that, of all the AI-to-AI investment deals between 2021 and 2025, 16.1% by deal count and 46.4% by deal value also involved commercial supply chain relationships between the investor and target firms.
According to BIS, an investment relationship established between two AI firms over 2021–2025 is defined as circular if the firms also share a supplier-customer relationship at any point in the same period.
BIS said that there are three types of circular investment relationships between AI firms, where the first type is an AI firm that invests in a target AI company that also supplies inputs; the second type occurs when capital and goods or services flow in opposite directions, where a customer is financing its supplier; and the third type involves a reciprocal commercial relationship, with goods or services flowing in both directions.
Also, the bank said that circular investment relationships reflect key economic features such as the need to secure critical inputs and the presence of information asymmetries. Yet, they entail macroeconomic risks and increase opacity.
Moreover, the study, which was based on 972 intra-AI investment relationships between 2021 and 2025, revealed that 28.7% of AI firms’ investment deals in the same period involved a target company that was also an AI firm by deal value, while 55.2% of incoming investments in AI firms came from other AI firms.
BIS extracted financing information from AI giants that have grown both organically and through acquisitions and selected US-based AI firms in descending order by 2025 market cap for the study.
Furthermore, the BIS study showed that 64% of the relationships between the two AI firms involve an AI firm that invests in and supplies its products to another AI firm.
“These numbers suggest that a significant portion of financing and commercial relationships in AI are self-referencing,” the BIS study said.
