No, Big Tech Isn’t Hiding $1.65 Trillion of Debt · Finterm
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No, Big Tech Isn’t Hiding $1.65 Trillion of Debt
Summary
A viral article claims Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle are hiding $1.65<br>trillion of debt. We paid $18 to read the full article.<br>We then checked the companies’ SEC filings and reproduced the $1.65 trillion figure.
But it is not debt. It combines $821 billion of leases that have not started with $829<br>billion of purchase and construction commitments.<br>These payments are spread over one to 30 years.
The companies report about $430 billion of interest-bearing debt.<br>Their total liabilities are about $1.35 trillion, or 81% of their combined annual<br>revenue. None of this was hidden.<br>The figures were easy to find in the SEC filings.
Evidence: The sources and method appendix contains<br>the filing links, calculations, definitions, and claim-by-claim support.<br>Data was sourced from the Finterm CLI.
Disclaimer: This is an accounting and public-filing fact check, not investment<br>advice.
The $1.65 Trillion Total Reconciles
A viral Nikkei article reported that “hidden debt” at five U.S. technology companies had<br>reached $1.65 trillion.<br>That figure sounds implausible beside the companies’ reported debt, but the arithmetic<br>does reconcile to their filings.1
Figure 1. The reconstructed $1.6507 trillion headline is almost evenly split: $821.4<br>billion of uncommenced leases and $829.2 billion of purchase and construction<br>commitments. Company details and source periods are in<br>C1.
The article did not fabricate the numerator.<br>It appears to have added two broad categories:
lease payments promised under contracts for assets that were not yet available for<br>use
contractual commitments to buy infrastructure, equipment, capacity, energy,<br>inventory, content, and other goods or services
The disclosures are large because AI infrastructure is large, contracts can run for<br>decades, and the table adds nominal payments across those years.<br>Microsoft’s subtotal also mixes reporting dates: its $196.6 billion lease figure is from<br>March 2026, while $142.1 billion of purchase and construction commitments comes from<br>June 2025.
Figure 2. The viral article compares $1.651 trillion of future contracts with $1.350<br>trillion of total liabilities.<br>The latter includes $430 billion of interest-bearing borrowings; no optional spending<br>plans are included in the headline amount.
Using the same categories in fiscal 2022 produces $206.296 billion.<br>Dividing $1.650676 trillion by that baseline gives 8.0015 times .2 The<br>“eightfold” claim is therefore accurate under the article’s category choice.
The $1.35 Trillion Comparison Reveals the Error
The article says the $1.65 trillion exceeds “roughly $1.35 trillion in debt reflected on<br>their balance sheets.”<br>The five balance sheets do add to $1.3500 trillion, but only if every liability is<br>treated as debt.3 Recognized interest-bearing borrowings total $430.0<br>billion, less than one-third of the reported liability total.
Total liabilities include far more than bonds and loans.<br>They include accounts payable, accrued compensation, deferred revenue, taxes, recognized<br>lease liabilities, and other obligations arising in normal operations.
Calling total liabilities “debt” makes the comparison look more coherent than it is.<br>The article sets an undiscounted flow of future contractual payments against a current<br>balance-sheet stock, labels both debt, and treats the larger number as evidence of<br>concealment.
Three Different Things Were Collapsed Into “Debt”
The accounting distinction matters because each category has different economics.
Borrowings
Borrowings are funded financing: bonds, notes, term loans, commercial paper, and similar<br>claims. The company has already received cash or another financial asset and owes<br>principal, usually with interest.<br>These obligations sit on the balance sheet.
Uncommenced Leases
An uncommenced lease is a signed contract for the future right to use an asset that is<br>not yet available. A data center may still be under construction, for example.
Under U.S. lease accounting, a lessee generally records a discounted lease liability and<br>an offsetting right-of-use asset when the lease commences , not when the contract is<br>signed.4 That timing explains why future payments for an uncommenced<br>lease can appear in the notes but not yet in the balance-sheet lease liability.
The eventual balance-sheet liability will not ordinarily equal the filing’s nominal<br>payment total. The company discounts the future payments to present value and records an<br>asset on the other side of the entry.
Purchase Commitments
A purchase commitment is an executory...