The current cross-deals aren't purely circular; quite a bit of revenue is, in fact, flowing into the AI industry from the outside (you know, via customers). What's more notable is the shared risk, as the deals tie multiple companies across the chain to a set of shared bets.

If the frontier labs suddenly found themselves unable to compete with cheap open weight models running on widely available compute, then one might expect the frontier labs to be the only ones exposed to that risk, while a chip-manufacturer like nvidia could thrive in either environment. A partnership or commitment from the chip manufacturers to the frontier labs could change that. Whether that kind of inescapable connection exists is hard to predict without a lot of specific modeling, and at this point I'm inclined to think that neither chip nor datacenter demand is going to drop any time soon, and that the commitments would be unwound before a company like nvidia is threatened.