BlockBeats report: On July 24, the hidden debt incurred by five U.S. tech giants—Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle—due to the expansion of AI infrastructure has reached $1.65 trillion, an approximately eightfold increase over four years, surpassing their combined on-balance-sheet liabilities of $1.35 trillion during the same period.
Reports indicate that as competition in AI intensifies, tech giants are making large-scale investments in data centers, GPUs, and server purchases, securing computing resources through long-term leasing agreements and equipment procurement contracts. Under U.S. GAAP accounting standards, certain equipment purchases not yet delivered and data center leases not yet activated do not need to be immediately recorded on the balance sheet; these future payment obligations are typically disclosed only in the financial statement footnotes.
Data shows that capital expenditures on AI by the five major tech companies continue to expand. Alphabet’s capital expenditure for fiscal year 2025 reached $85 billion; Microsoft’s capital expenditure for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 reached $34.9 billion; Amazon plans to invest approximately $200 billion in 2026, primarily in AWS data centers and AI chips; Meta expects its capital expenditure for 2025 to be between $60 billion and $65 billion; Oracle, driven by cloud service orders from OpenAI, anticipates its capital expenditure for fiscal year 2027 to rise to between $90 billion and $95 billion.
Moody’s data shows that Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Oracle have signed data center lease commitments totaling approximately $662 billion, which have not yet been recorded on their balance sheets and represent 113% of the five companies’ adjusted debt. As these lease agreements come into effect, over $500 billion in related debt may be transferred to their official financial statements.
Analysts warn that if revenue growth from AI businesses fails to keep pace with rapidly expanding capital investments, substantial long-term commitments could undermine corporate cash flow flexibility.
Additionally, the expansion model of the AI industry has triggered risks of shadow lending and circular investment. Some technology companies finance AI infrastructure through bond issuance, equity financing, and off-balance-sheet contracts, while the financial loop among NVIDIA, cloud service providers, and tech giants has raised market concerns that it may amplify expectations of industry growth and obscure the underlying risk of insufficient real demand.