A chart credited to ZeroHedge and shared on X on 1 November puts the disclosed off-balance-sheet commitments of Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Broadcom and SpaceX at $4.11 trillion. Our own count from the same filings, published on 31 October, came to $3.94 trillion.
Line by line, the two counts agree within $1 billion for five of the eight companies, by our arithmetic. Most of the $161.7 billion gap is one item our count left out: Nvidia’s guarantees, capped at $105 billion, for an OpenAI affiliate’s leases at an Ohio campus.
Business Pill · Capex and Depreciation
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The key insight: As we read the two counts, they agree within $1 billion for five of eight companies, and about 65% of the $161.7 billion gap is Nvidia’s $105 billion guarantee cap for an OpenAI affiliate’s Ohio leases, by our arithmetic.
The chart’s company totals for Alphabet ($1,059 billion), Meta ($866 billion), Microsoft ($594 billion), Oracle ($322 billion) and Broadcom ($202 billion) match our 31 October figures of $1,059.0 billion, $866.5 billion, $593.2 billion, $322.2 billion and $201.8 billion.
Its subtitle says it uses each company’s latest 10-Q or 10-K as of 30 October, undiscounted, and compares the total with Morgan Stanley’s $3.29 trillion in August. Including items it labels news-based, the chart gives $4.29 trillion.
From our 31 October count of $3,944.3 billion to the $4,106 billion total of the chart credited to ZeroHedge: Nvidia’s SB Energy guarantees, capped at $105 billion (Nvidia 10-Q), SpaceX’s Apollo GPU finance lease of about $40 billion (SpaceX 8-K), and about $14.7 billion of Amazon lines plus about $2 billion of other differences, mostly SpaceX. The gap and shares are our arithmetic; chart values are read from the image.
What Was Posted on X
The hidden AI financial obligations are SKYROCKETING:
Disclosed off-balance-sheet commitments across Alphabet, $GOOGL, Amazon, $AMZN, Meta, $META, Microsoft, $MSFT, Nvidia, $NVDA, Broadcom, $AVGO, Oracle, $ORCL, and SpaceX surged to a record $4.1 trillion in October.
This is up
— Global Markets Investor (@globalmktobserv) Nov 01 17:07
Global Markets Investor (@GlobalMktObserv) posted this on 1 November with a chart credited to ZeroHedge that puts disclosed off-balance-sheet commitments of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle and SpaceX at $4.11 trillion. This piece compares the chart’s company totals with our own 31 October count from the filings. The post’s $3.1 trillion August figure differs from the $3.29 trillion Morgan Stanley August total printed on the chart, and its June and on-balance-sheet figures are not on the chart; we have not checked those three figures.
Nvidia’s $105 Billion Ohio Guarantee
Nvidia’s 10-Q for the quarter ended 26 July says that in August 2026 it “entered into guarantees, capped at a total of $ 105 billion, to provide credit support on a land, power, and shell buildout” with affiliates of SB Energy on behalf of an affiliate of OpenAI, for leases covering about 4.25 gigawatts of IT load in Pike County, Ohio.
The filing says each guarantee “generally becomes effective upon commencement of the applicable lease” and that the first of nine phases is expected in fiscal 2029. It adds that the guarantees are “limited to defined portions of lease and power payments and not the full cost of the site”. We covered the deal in August.
Our tracker counted Nvidia at $425.5 billion and the chart at $530 billion, a $104.5 billion difference. The chart’s $108 billion of Nvidia guarantees and backstops equals the $105 billion cap plus the $3.5 billion of land, power and shell guarantees the 10-Q lists for AI cloud partners, by our arithmetic.
SpaceX’s $40 Billion GPU Lease
The chart adds an October GPU lease to SpaceX’s figure for the quarter ended 30 September. SpaceX’s 8-K of 26 October says it signed a binding commitment letter for a master finance lease of GPU pods with an entity managed by Apollo, and expects aggregate principal payments of “approximately $40 billion”, as we reported.
The 8-K says the lease is expected to close before year end and that the lease schedules are expected to start in the first half of 2027. Our tracker carried SpaceX at its 10-Q figure of $37.8 billion; the chart shows $80 billion.
The Business Lever: Guarantees Move the Total
By our arithmetic, Nvidia’s cap is about 65% of the gap, and with SpaceX’s lease about 90%. The rest is mostly Amazon, where the chart’s $453 billion is $14.7 billion above our $438.3 billion.
Adding the Nvidia cap to our count gives about $4.05 trillion; adding the SpaceX lease as well gives about $4.09 trillion, by our arithmetic. As we read the two counts, the difference comes down to which guarantees and signed but unclosed leases are counted, not to purchase orders, where the counts agree. Related: Google and Meta partner guarantees and Big Tech free cash flow.
The Structural Read
As we read Nvidia’s 10-Q, the guarantees start only when each lease commences, the first of nine phases is expected in fiscal 2029, and payment is triggered by certain tenant defaults.
As we read SpaceX’s 8-K, the $40 billion GPU lease was a binding commitment letter, not yet closed, with schedules expected to start in the first half of 2027.
As we read our own tracker, adding the Nvidia cap gives about $4.05 trillion and adding the SpaceX lease as well about $4.09 trillion, by our arithmetic.
Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 26 July 2026
“Our guarantees are limited to defined portions of lease and power payments and not the full cost of the site or all of the tenantโs obligations.”
Three Implications
FOR READERS OF OFF-BOOK TALLIES The chart credited to ZeroHedge and our 31 October count match within $1 billion for Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Broadcom, by our arithmetic.
FOR NVIDIA Its 10-Q says the SB Energy guarantees are capped at $105 billion and that the site will exclusively host Nvidia AI infrastructure, subject to limited exceptions.
FOR SPACEX Its 8-K says aggregate principal payments under the Apollo GPU lease are expected to total approximately $40 billion.
The framework says “It is a sovereign-scale financing problem dressed in tech-company clothing โ and the financial architecture is starting to invert.”
As we read it, a chip supplier guaranteeing a customer’s data center leases is one form of that inversion. The framework predates these filings and does not discuss them.
The chart’s values are read from the image, and it does not itemise Amazon’s extra lines. The X post’s $3.1 trillion for August differs from the $3.29 trillion Morgan Stanley August total printed on the chart; its $1.8 trillion for June and $1.0 trillion of on-balance-sheet debt and leases are not on the chart. We have not checked those three figures. Guarantee caps are maximum payments, not expected ones, and the SpaceX lease had not closed when the 8-K was filed.
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Two counts of Big Tech’s off-balance-sheet commitments, $3.94 trillion and $4.11 trillion, agree line by line for five of eight companies, by our arithmetic. About 65% of the $161.7 billion gap is Nvidia’s $105 billion guarantee cap for an OpenAI affiliate’s Ohio leases, and about 90% with SpaceX’s $40 billion GPU lease.
A note on sourcing. The $4.11 trillion total and company figures come from a chart credited to ZeroHedge, shared on X by Global Markets Investor; we read its values from the image and did not see a method note beyond its subtitle and source line. Nvidia and SpaceX details come from their SEC filings, which we read. Our own totals come from our 31 October tracker. The gap, shares and adjusted totals are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
