Big Tech Is Hiding $1.65 Trillion in Debt. How Worried Should Investors Be?
Credit analysts warn that hidden leases and special-purpose vehicles could shift hundreds of billions of dollars onto balance sheets as AI spending accelerates.
- A Nikkei study revealed on Tuesday that five tech titans—Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle—hold $1.65 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI debt, exceeding their $1.35 trillion in reported debt.
- To keep costs off their books, companies package debt for chips and servers into separate legal entities, mirroring structures Enron used 25 years ago to hide obligations.
- Meta carries about $420 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, nearly triple its reported debt, while Oracle holds $260 billion in future lease commitments and Nvidia carries $119 billion in purchase obligations.
- On Monday, the cost of protecting Oracle's debt against default reached a record high as Goldman Sachs' trading desk noted "signs of panic" among investors lending to AI companies.
- Insights from the dot-com era might help investors avoid similar mistakes; when WorldCom collapsed in 2002, 22 other communication companies went bankrupt and bondholders recovered perhaps 20% of what they were owed.
24 Articles
24 Articles
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Big Tech's (NASDAQ: MSFT, META, AMZN, GOOG, ORCL) $1.65 Trillion In Off-Balance-Sheet AI Commitments Demands Investor Scrutiny
Big Tech’s artificial intelligence infrastructure race has quietly accumulated $1.65 trillion in future lease and purchase obligations that most investors are not fully accounting for. A Nikkei investigation of SEC filings found that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG), and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) have each built enormous off-balance-sheet commitments tied to data centers, network…
Five tech giants hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using trick that toppled Enron
Image by: PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images TNW July 21, 2026 Five of the biggest US tech giants are carrying $1.65 trillion in debt that does not show up on their balance sheets, more than the debt that does. It is bankrolling the AI data-centre boom, it is perfectly legal, and it uses the same accounting trick...
Big Tech Is Hiding $1.65 Trillion in Debt. How Worried Should Investors Be?
The five biggest names in tech are reporting earnings this week, and their balance sheets will look reassuringly clean. But SEC filings tell a very different story buried deep in the footnotes.
The AI boom is increasingly being financed by debt. Tech companies are absorbing billions in the bond market. Whether the bet will rise to the future is not a matter of fact. By Claudia Wehrle.
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