Everyone keeps saying to me the same dollars are being counted twice by AI vendors. I hear you, so here’s what I came up with. The same four companies appear at the top of a cycle (they fund the labs) and again at the bottom (they get paid for the compute). The dollar does a cycle to land back where it started, counted twice.

Anthropic’s compute spend, for example, loops back to its own investors (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia), while OpenAI’s biggest compute checks go to Oracle, which isn’t on its cap table.

Microsoft and Nvidia in November 2025 committed up to a combined $15 billion to Anthropic, pushing Anthropic’s valuation to around $350 billion, roughly double its $183 billion mark from September. In the same deal Anthropic committed to buy $30 billion of Azure compute and to contract up to one gigawatt more, plus up to a gigawatt of Nvidia Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

Amazon went from $8 billion to a far larger commitment in April 2026, another $25 billion, against Anthropic’s pledge to spend more than $100 billion on AWS over ten years. Google, after earlier stakes totaling $3 billion, moved to invest $10 billion immediately with up to $30 billion more to follow, alongside access to up to a million TPUs.

So take Amazon and Alphabet as an example. When they put more money into Anthropic, they push its valuation up, and the stake they already own goes up with it, which they book as profit without Anthropic ever paying them a dollar. In Q1 2026, Amazon reported pre-tax gains of $16.8 billion from its Anthropic investment, which is more than half its pre-tax income for the quarter, and its $8 billion stake is now marked at more than $70 billion: a mark-to-market gain booked today against compute liabilities that will compound over a decade.

All that is to say only one real dollar is written down as the value in two places: an AI dollar has been setup to hit books twice.