alt Hacker News>Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services.
That's not what's happening here though. Google isn't using the value of its shares to fund demand. Google is using its own cash flow to fund this demand from Anthropic.
The question is whether Anthropic has demand from end users for the capacity they are buying from Google (that's a yes I guess) and whether that demand is profitable for Anthropic (that's a question mark).
True.
Regardless, (a) it's ability/desire to make such investments is still driven by stock-driven optimism and (b) these transactions' "signal" can have a similar, warping effect.
In this case the transaction creates demand for Google's services and also funds anthropic's growth... which represents demands for google's services.
"Loop" is an approximation of an analogy. The risk is that enough of such transactions create a dynamic that distorts feedbacks.