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

Muhammad Zuhair
Man holding a microphone sitting on a chair with a nature backdrop.
Image Credits: Salesforce

Anthropic's CEO has raised concerns around the recent AI deals being made in the industry, claiming that the press is "focusing too much" on building datacenters.

Anthropic CEO Believes That Firms Are "Doubling" & "Triple" Counting DC Investments

Well, the industry has seen massive collaborations happening in the AI front in the past few weeks, mainly driven by a non-profit organization, and yes, you guessed it right, it's OpenAI. The deals formulated involve the deployment of 'multi-GW' data centers across a variety of tech stacks, and the announcements were so significant that they resulted in the financial markets reacting a 'little too' positively towards them. While Anthropic's CEO is confident in the data center buildout, he has expressed concern around some of the deals, calling them 'fishy'.

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I do get a bit worried when the press focuses too much on the building of the data centers and deals to build data centers. Some of these deals seem a little bit fishy. They seem like they're maybe double counting.
- Anthropic's CEO

Well, Amodei didn't put out any names, even after being asked by the host, Marc Benioff, so he probably managed to dodge a bullet there. But, since he was asked about some of the recent AI deals, we could probably guess which company he was throwing a shade at. Anyways, Amodei has also mentioned the 'double counting' phenomenon here, which we don't hear quite too often. He is basically referring to how the press manages to frame an investment deal, where the same data center investment is reported by multiple companies, which signifies the actual amount, although it is the same for the parties involved.

Interestingly, Anthropic's CEO also claims that some deals out there are 'triple counting' the investments, and yet again, he didn't name any specific occasion. Of course, we also cannot pinpoint a particular deal being under the areas Amodei mentioned. If you think these comments are targeted at OpenAI, it might not be a far-fetched guess, considering the underlying competition between Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as Amodei being a former executive in Altman's AI firm.

The AI data center segment is evolving rapidly, with multi-billion-dollar deals being announced almost every week, so the interest is defintely there. More importantly, to get the computing power needed to refine AI models, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI require interest from the likes of NVIDIA and Microsoft, which is why partnerships hold such immense value.

Muhammad Zuhair Photo

About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.

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