Frensic.

A multibillion-pound drive to “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy is riddled with “phantom investments” and shaky accounting, a Guardian investigation has found.

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On Monday, former UK deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg and former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg were announced as new board members at one of the firms, NScale. Nscale also said it had raised a $2bn funding round, sending its valuation soaring to $14.6bn.

But a Guardian investigation has shown the money isn’t necessarily real, the datacentres may not be new, the jobs are unaccounted for – and the supercomputer site 12 miles north of London is still a scaffolding yard.

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In one case, it said that there was no contract in place for a £1.9bn ($2.5bn) investment despite a press release declaring that one had been signed. In another, it said that it was “not playing an active role in auditing these commitments”.

The findings raise questions about a series of massive AI investments announced globally in the past year, many in high-level press releases from governments and tech companies.

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CoreWeave said the investment would “create job opportunities” and herald further expansion. Six months later, it announced that the two datacentres were operational: one in London Docklands, and one in Crawley near Gatwick.

Planning records indicate that CoreWeave built no new datacentres at either location during that time period. Neither did the two partners mentioned in its press release.

In fact, while CoreWeave’s – and the government’s – communications imply that physical buildings were built by suggesting the investment would bring “two new data centres to our shores”, this was misleading.

The Guardian understands that CoreWeave became a customer of two existing datacentres, one built in 2002 and one built in 2015, both of which lease space to a host of other companies, including Google and Fujitsu. CoreWeave rented space in these datacentres, and deployed Nvidia chips that it had paid for.

Effectively, its investment amounts to the relocation into the UK of computer chips manufactured in Taiwan by a US company.

There is no indication in public-facing materials that CoreWeave has made other investments, beyond renting an office in a building in Southwark, London, which it has called its “European headquarters.”

Rikap said it was “very common” for datacentre developers to frame the purchase of equipment, or the acquisition of other companies, as investment. “The rules are very flexible and help them to make these big claims and investments that a government like Starmer’s, which is desperate for good news, can use for their favour.”

In a response to a query from the Guardian, the government said that the figures it had announced for CoreWeave’s investment did not come from them. A statement said they were produced by CoreWeave.

It did not say whether this investment amounted to capital or equipment.