A Nikkei investigation found that Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle have $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on their balance sheets, more than the $1.35 trillion they officially report. Their “shadow borrowing” was concealed from the markets and from the public using some of the same accounting gimmicks that had wrecked Enron. The fact that none of the five companies responded to Nikkei’s request for a comment, is not reassuring.
The debts stem from AI-related investments like GPU contracts, data center leases, and joint ventures that don't count as debt under accounting rules until the facilities go live. Meta's hidden debt is $420 billion, triple its reported debt. Oracle's grew 30-fold in four years. In all, these firms’ debts mushroomed 8-fold relative to where it was only four years ago.
Then came a crushing blow to US-based AI offerings: on 27 July Moonshot will be giving Kimi away as an open-weight suite, so any company or government in the world can download it and run it on their own hardware - no restrictions and no subscriptions necessary.
https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/headwinds-are-multiplying-for-trump
