Big tech has promised about $1.5 trillion for AI it has not paid for yet — and roughly $1 trillion of it appears on no balance sheet
Filings for the quarter that ended on 30 June put the combined purchase commitments of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Oracle and Nvidia at roughly $1.5 trillion, up from about $1 trillion three months earlier. Alphabet alone accounts for $811 billion of that, against $332.4 billion in the previous quarter. Separately, Goldman Sachs estimates the same group has signed around $1.5 trillion of lease commitments — data centres, offices, research sites and equipment, up from roughly $200 billion five years ago — of which about $1 trillion covers leases that have not commenced. Until a lease starts or a purchase order is drawn down, neither shows up as a liability on the balance sheet; both sit in the footnotes.
Why it mattersThese are real contractual obligations to pay real money, and the standard accounting rules say they do not have to appear where investors look first. That is not fraud — it is how lease accounting works — but it means the headline debt figures for the companies building the AI boom understate what they have committed to. The number that matters is the gap between when the payments come due and when the AI revenue arrives to cover them. If that revenue lands, the footnotes stay footnotes. If it is late, obligations that were invisible become a liquidity problem all at once, and the companies most exposed are the ones whose cloud and ad businesses are paying for everyone else's compute.
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