Nine major tech companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, have accumulated approximately $3 trillion in AI-related financial commitments that do not appear on their balance sheets. This amount represents five times the capital expenditures of these same companies over the past year, including $1.2 trillion in not-yet-started data center leases and $1.9 trillion in purchase commitments for chips and equipment. Alphabet saw its contractual obligations surge from $332 billion to $811 billion in a single quarter, while Oracle’s off-balance-sheet commitments grew 30-fold over four years to reach $273 billion. This practice, perfectly legal under US GAAP accounting standards, renders traditional leverage metrics inadequate and exposes investors to refinancing risk if AI revenue growth does not keep pace with infrastructure buildout.
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