BlockBeats News, July 24th, the implicit debt scale generated by the AI infrastructure expansion of five US tech giants, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle, has reached $16.5 trillion, about 8 times larger than four years ago, surpassing the on-balance sheet debt total of $13.5 trillion during the same period.

According to reports, as the AI competition heats up, tech giants have made large-scale investments in data centers, GPUs, and servers, and have locked in computing power resources through long-term leasing agreements, equipment purchase contracts, and other means. Due to the US GAAP accounting standards, undelivered equipment purchases and unused data center leases do not need to be immediately included in the balance sheet, and these future payment obligations are usually only disclosed in the financial report footnotes.

Data shows that the AI capital expenditures of the five major tech companies continue to expand. Among them, Alphabet's capital expenditure for the 2025 fiscal year reached $85 billion; Microsoft's capital expenditure for the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year reached $34.9 billion; Amazon plans to invest around $2 trillion in 2026, mainly for AWS data centers and AI chips; Meta expects capital expenditures for 2025 to be between $600 billion and $650 billion; and Oracle, driven by OpenAI cloud service orders, expects capital expenditures for the 2027 fiscal year to increase to $90 billion to $95 billion.

Moody's data shows that Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Oracle have data center lease commitments that have been signed but not yet included in the balance sheet, totaling approximately $662 billion, accounting for 113% of the five companies' adjusted debt. As the lease agreements gradually take effect, over $500 billion of related debt may be transferred to the formal financial statements.

Analysts warn that if the growth in AI business revenue fails to match the rapid expansion of capital investment, the huge long-term commitments could weaken corporate cash flow resilience.

In addition, the AI industry expansion model has also triggered "shadow borrowing" and circular investment risks. Some tech companies support AI infrastructure construction through bond financing, equity financing, and off-balance sheet contracts, and the funding cycle between Nvidia, cloud service providers, and tech giants has also raised concerns in the market that it may magnify industry prosperity expectations, masking the risk of insufficient actual demand.