Big Tech's off-balance-sheet AI debt doubled to $3.2 trillion

Nikkei Asia reports that off-balance-sheet AI obligations at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle have almost doubled in six months to about $3.2 trillion, up from about $1.65 trillion in its earlier tally of the same five companies.

The money is not bank debt: it is future lease payments and multi-year purchase contracts for chips, servers and data-center capacity, disclosed in the footnotes of SEC filings rather than on the balance sheets investors read first. Meta alone carries about $420 billion, nearly triple its roughly $58.7 billion of reported long-term debt.

A same-day rival tally from Kalkine puts the total nearer $3.3 trillion but disagrees sharply company by company, putting Meta at $866 billion against Nikkei's $420 billion, so the $3.2 trillion is an order of magnitude rather than a measurement, and the direction is the story: the AI build-out is being financed off the page.