Big Tech and Anthropic have $4.49 trillion in AI commitments that don't show up on their balance sheets

The seven biggest AI spenders have promised to pay about $4.49 trillion for data center leases and purchase deals that do not appear as debt on their balance sheets. That figure comes from JPMorgan Asset Management's Michael Cembalest, whose Nov. 4 Eye on the Market report tallied the commitments for Google, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and Oracle.

By his count, only 15% of these companies' debt and lease commitments sit on the balance sheet. The rest are leases that have not started yet and contracts to buy chips, power and capacity. Cembalest wrote that this "may explain why their credit spreads have been widening rapidly," meaning lenders are demanding more interest to fund them.

Five days later, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned that AI returns may arrive more slowly than markets expect. Together, the two make the clearest case yet that the AI build-out has a financing question, not just a valuation one.

What the $4.49 trillion is#

The off-balance-sheet total is not hidden debt, and it is not illegal. Under current accounting rules, a company records a lease on its balance sheet when the lease starts. A data center that is still being built, or a long contract to buy chips or cloud capacity, shows up only in the notes to the financial statements. Cembalest's chart splits the obligations into two groups: "leases not yet started and purchase commitments" off the balance sheet, and "long term debt and lease liabilities" on it.

Google

$1,077B

Anthropic

$865B

Meta

$810B

Microsoft

$575B

Nvidia

$422B

Amazon

$419B

Oracle

$322B

Source: J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Eye on the Market, Nov. 4, 2026

Show the numbers

Company	Off balance sheet
Google	$1,077B
Anthropic	$865B
Meta	$810B
Microsoft	$575B
Nvidia	$422B
Amazon	$419B
Oracle	$322B

The on-balance-sheet debt and lease total for the same seven is about $758 billion, by the same chart. That means off-balance-sheet commitments are close to six times what the companies carry as debt and lease liabilities.

Source: J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

Why Anthropic stands out#

Six of the seven are giant public companies with cash flows to match. Anthropic is the exception. It is a private company, and at $865 billion its off-balance-sheet commitments rank second, ahead of Meta and Microsoft. The JPMorgan chart does not break down what the commitments are for, and Anthropic, as a private company, does not publish public filings the way the others do.

That matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and investors will have to judge whether its revenue can grow fast enough to cover those promises. Our story on Anthropic's IPO and the AI selloff covers the valuation debate. It also matters for the companies on the other side of the contracts. One company's purchase commitment is often another's expected revenue, so chip suppliers such as Nvidia, the subject of our recent story on its outlook and its CEO, depend on buyers like these following through.

The Kobeissi Letter, a widely followed markets newsletter, shared the tally on Monday, calling the scale of the obligations "extraordinary." The post drew more than 1,200 likes and about 196,000 views.

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The Bank of England's warning#

Bailey's speech in Zurich on Monday approached the issue from the other side: the money is committed now, while the payoff may take longer.

The returns "may be good, and they may match expectations," Bailey said, but they could take longer to arrive than predicted, according to City AM. He pointed to Edison and electricity as an example of a big technology that took years to pay off. "There are good reasons to believe that the world moves faster now, but still the timing may not live up to market expectations."

Bailey, who also chairs the global Financial Stability Board, added that "bubble spotting is an imprecise science." He repeated an earlier warning that "everyone is priced to be a winner," and cited Netscape, the leading web browser of the 1990s that later lost out to Microsoft. The full speech is on the Bank's site.

JPMorgan expects the top U.S. cloud companies to spend about $900 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, City AM reported.

Why lenders care more than stock buyers#

A stock price can fall and recover. A lease or purchase contract has to be paid. That is why Cembalest tied the figures to credit spreads, the extra interest companies pay over Treasury bonds. Wider spreads mean lenders see more risk.

Not every analyst reads the total as a single bill. The X account MicNguyenn105, which posts crypto and market research, made that point on Tuesday: "These amounts are not all debt, and they do not become cash payments on the same date." The post argued that investors should look at "timing, cancellation terms" before treating the total as a single bill.

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Cembalest also pointed to another source of pressure. Hedge funds have cut their gross exposure to stocks by 8% from its recent peak, the largest drawdown since 2016, he wrote. Much of the recent AI selloff, in his reading, came from that profit-taking, not only from new worries about debt. Our markets story on the S&P 500's rebound tracks how quickly prices have swung since.

The debate on Reddit#

Investors on Reddit have argued over a similar, smaller estimate. A thread on r/FluentInFinance is titled after a claim attributed to investor Michael Burry that the figure is about $3 trillion: Michael Burry says Big Tech is carrying ~$3 trillion in AI obligations off its balance sheets. JPMorgan's count is about 50% higher than that and includes Anthropic, which is not publicly traded.

The bottom line for investors#

The six public companies disclose these commitments in the notes to their filings; they are not hidden. The point of Cembalest's chart is to add them up in one place. Off the balance sheet, $4.49 trillion is easy to miss. On a lender's desk, it is a promise that has to be funded, whether AI revenue arrives on schedule or, as Bailey warned, later than the market hopes.

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