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The hidden debt of U.S. tech giants Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and Oracle (ORCL) has soared to $1.65T, according to a Nikkei study.
This estimate for the most recent quarter is around eight times higher than four years ago and exceeds the actual debt figure of $1.35T seen in their balance sheets, the study showed.
The hidden debt estimate includes off-balance sheet costs, such as long-term lease agreements for GPUs and data centers that are not yet operational. These agreements can be valued at tens of billions of dollars.
For instance, Oracle has its Stargate data center project with OpenAI (OPENAI). Its hidden debt rose over 30-fold in four years to $273.3B, according to Nikkei.
Meta has a joint venture with Blue Owl Capital for a large-scale data center in Louisiana, with a $27B development cost announced in 2025. More recently, though, Meta (META) said its total expected investment in the facility was now over $50B.
Nikkei estimated that Meta's off-balance-sheet debt was particularly high at $420B, almost three times its on-record debt.
Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon have previously publicly disclosed backlogs of around $1.45T for cloud services and other businesses at the end of March.
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