Apollo's viral "circular AI spending" charts debunked: Ramp card data skews to seed startups
2C_ornot2C · x · 2026-10-25
A point-by-point rebuttal of Apollo's viral charts claiming AI spending is just circular VC money: (1) selection bias — the data comes from Ramp corporate cards, capturing seed/Series A-B startups, while real Fortune 500 spend flows through multi-million-dollar AWS Bedrock/Azure/GCP master service agreements, invisible to card data; (2) power laws — the top 10% of firms accounting for 95.6% of OpenAI/Anthropic spend (model serving 99.5%, neocloud 99.0%) mirrors concentration across cloud, SaaS and ads, not unique circularity. Conclusion: the narrative is a masterclass in financial data misdirection.
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