🏦 TIL: Five US tech giants are carrying $1.65 trillion in AI-related obligations that don't appear on their balance sheets, more than the $1.35 trillion that does.

A Nikkei study of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle found this invisible debt has grown 8x in four years. It's future payment obligations: data center leases, GPU supply contracts, and SPV financing, disclosed only in the footnotes.

The mechanics are legal but eye-opening. Meta's $27B Hyperion data center in Louisiana is owned by a joint venture (Meta 20%, Blue Owl Capital 80%) that raised the debt from Pimco, BlackRock, and Apollo. Meta leases it back in 4-year blocks so it stays an operating expense, not debt. Oracle's off-book commitments grew 30x in four years, much of it for the Stargate project with OpenAI.

The catch: when these facilities go live, the leases roll onto the balance sheet at once. If AI demand falls short, the losses land on lenders and insurers (including, indirectly, annuity holders).

Meanwhile Apple, which sat out the AI buildout, sued OpenAI for trade secret theft on July 10.

Read more:
asia.nikkei.com/business/techn…
financialpost.com/financial-ti…
techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/appl…

#AI #BigTech #finance