Five US tech giants' hidden AI debt hits $1.65T, Nikkei says

The single number in Nikkei's new study is small enough to read past, and big enough to matter: about $1.65 trillion of off-balance-sheet debt across five US tech giants, tied to the AI buildout.

The context is what makes the number interesting. Nikkei reports that this hidden debt has swelled roughly eightfold in about four years as AI investment ballooned, and it now exceeds the companies' actual reported debt. The specific instruments the study points at are data center leases and GPU supply contracts, obligations that behave like debt if you have to pay them regardless of demand, but that don't sit in the debt line when the market prices the equity.

Meta is the case study the reporting singles out. Its off-balance-sheet liabilities come in around $420 billion, nearly triple its transparent debt. That is a company most investors would still describe as effectively net-cash, when in reality the obligation stack sits roughly on the order of the infrastructure it has committed to build.

The honest caveat is that hidden debt is a construction rather than a GAAP line item, and the retrieved reporting does not spell out per-company figures for the other four giants or the precise methodology, so treat the totals as an analyst estimate rather than settled disclosure. It is also not clear whether the SEC or the ratings agencies will lean on any of this.

What is clear enough to act on: if you were underwriting AI exposure by reading only the balance sheet, you were seeing about half the leverage. The near-term watch is which credit analyst or short seller starts pricing those lease and supply commitments alongside bonds, and whether the disclosure norm follows.