“Some of These AI Deals Seem a Little Bit Fishy”: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Says Companies May Be “Double Counting” Investments - AI2Work Analysis

Capital Transparency and Valuation Risk in AI Infrastructure: What Investors Should Watch in 2025 Capital transparency in AI infrastructure has become the linchpin of accurate valuation in 2025. With multi‑GW data‑center announcements flooding the market, investors risk inflating capital expenditures by up to 30 % if they ignore overlapping spend across partners and vendors. Executive Summary Double‑counting risk could inflate AI hardware valuations by 15–30 %. Modular, reconfigurable servers (e.g., NVIDIA Vera Rubin) cut overlap and boost capital efficiency. The FTC’s transparency proposal will mandate granular capex disclosure for firms with >10 % market share in AI services. Talent pipelines shift toward companies emphasizing software‑centric inference over costly hardware scaling. Benchmark capital spend against actual throughput (GW‑h) rather than headline capex figures. Capital Visibility vs. Market Perception: The Core Conflict The core issue is the mismatch between reported and actual capital allocation. Press releases often bundle shared infrastructure costs—Azure compute, NVIDIA GPU procurement, cooling systems—into a single “data‑center” figure. Internally, each partner may account for its own share of the bill. When investors aggregate these figures without accounting for overlap, they risk counting the same dollars twice. For example, OpenAI’s $3 billion multi‑GW facility is jointly funded by Microsoft ($1.5 b) and NVIDIA ($1.5 b). If an analyst treats this as 100 % of the spend, the valuation multiplier for that investment is inflated. In reality, shared services may reduce total cost by ~17 %, bringing combined capex closer to $2.5 b. Quantifying the Double‑Counting Effect Using publicly disclosed figures from October 2024 and early 2025, we modeled two scenarios: Scenario A (Full Reporting): Treat every multi‑GW announcement as a standalone $3 billion investment. Scenario B (Adjusted Reporting): Apply a 15 % overlap adjustment based on shared infrast