Meta Joins Alphabet Near $870B as Commitments Hit $3.56T

A chart credited to ZeroHedge, built on a Morgan Stanley Research framework, says hyperscalers, Nvidia, Broadcom and SpaceX “now disclose $3.59tn of off-balance-sheet commitments”. We checked each company’s figures against its latest 10-Q or 10-K on SEC EDGAR as of 22 October 2026. By our arithmetic from those filings, the eight companies list about $3.56 trillion of purchase commitments, leases not yet commenced, guarantees and similar obligations.

The biggest change is Meta. Its 10-Q, filed on 22 October 2026, lists items that add up to $866.46 billion by our arithmetic, against $747 billion in the chart, which labels its Meta figure provisional. That puts Meta level with Alphabet, whose 10-Q for the quarter to 30 June 2026 lists items adding up to $871.3 billion.

Business Pill · TAKE-OR-PAY

A short Business Engineer explainer on take-or-pay contracts: paying for capacity whether you use it or not. It teaches the general idea only and says nothing about any company in this piece.

What the Filings Show

These are the line items we used, company by company. Each is a disclosed obligation that does not sit on the balance sheet as a liability, or a maximum exposure the company lists. Our grouping follows the chart’s categories.

• Alphabet (10-Q, 30 June 2026): expected future fixed or guaranteed commitments of $707.0 billion, “the significant majority of which related to long-term supply agreements”; leases not yet commenced with future payments of $85.2 billion, plus a short-term lease with a non-cancelable commitment of about $5.8 billion; backstops in the form of financial guarantees and credit derivatives with maximum potential future payments of $7.6 billion and $43.8 billion; and future funding commitments of $21.9 billion in unconsolidated entities.
• Meta (10-Q, 30 September 2026): $454.52 billion of non-cancelable contractual commitments; leases that have not yet commenced of about $355.73 billion; maximum residual value guarantees of $41.49 billion in its unconsolidated data center ventures; and contingent obligations to purchase up to $14.72 billion of cloud capacity.
• Microsoft (10-K, 30 June 2026): purchase commitments of $194.06 billion, which it says “primarily relate to datacenters”, and construction commitments of $34.57 billion; plus leases, primarily for datacenters, that had not yet commenced of $329.1 billion.
• Nvidia (10-Q, 26 July 2026): supply and capacity commitments of $279 billion, cloud service agreements of $29 billion, capital expenditures of $8 billion, data center leases not commenced of $25 billion, equity investment commitments of $25 billion, AI cloud agreements of $36 billion and data center leases not commenced for third parties of $20 billion. Its derivatives table lists land, power and shell guarantees for AI clouds with a notional value of $3.53 billion.
• Oracle (10-Q, 31 August 2026): unconditional purchase and other obligations of $34.15 billion, and $288 billion of additional lease commitments, “substantially all related to data center arrangements”.
• Amazon (10-Q, 30 June 2026): leases not yet commenced of $137.21 billion, unconditional purchase obligations of $130.07 billion and other commitments of $18.37 billion.
• Broadcom (10-Q, 2 August 2026): purchase commitments of $126.82 billion and other contractual commitments of $3.94 billion; a backstop on a customer’s AI rack lease obligations with a maximum potential liability of about $29 billion; and convertible notes of up to $42 billion that a customer may issue to it.
• SpaceX (10-Q, 30 June 2026): non-cancelable contractual commitments of $27.96 billion, primarily related to AI infrastructure, third-party cloud capacity and its spectrum transaction.

The Table: Eight Companies, $3.56 Trillion

The table groups the filings’ line items the way the chart does and sets our total for each company beside the chart’s figure. Purchase commitments are about $2.03 trillion and leases not yet commenced about $1.25 trillion of the total, by our arithmetic.

Line items from each company’s latest 10-Q or 10-K on SEC EDGAR as of 22 October 2026, undiscounted. The grouping into columns and every total are our arithmetic. The last column is the figure shown for each company in a chart credited to ZeroHedge that uses a Morgan Stanley Research framework.

Where Our Count Differs From the Chart

• Meta: $866.46 billion, not $747 billion. The chart is dated to filings as of 21 October 2026 and calls its Meta figure provisional; Meta filed its third-quarter 10-Q the next day. The chart’s $349 billion of Meta purchases matches the $349.31 billion of commitments in Meta’s second-quarter 10-Q, as our earlier piece reports. The new filing lists $454.52 billion.
• Nvidia: $425.53 billion, not $530 billion. The chart shows $108 billion of guarantees and backstops for Nvidia. Nvidia’s 10-Q for the quarter to 26 July 2026 lists land, power and shell guarantees with a notional value of $3.53 billion, and we could not trace the $108 billion to that filing. That $108 billion appears to match a figure from The Information: South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo, citing Nvidia’s SEC filings and analysis by The Information, reported on 22 October 2026 (UK time) that Nvidia’s guarantee limit, covering cases where customers like OpenAI fail to pay data center rent, reaches $108.5 billion. Our 21 October piece reported, from SBS News’ summary of The Information, that a single lease guarantee for an Ohio data center being developed by SB Energy, with OpenAI as the tenant, accounts for up to $105 billion of the $164.5 billion of Nvidia guarantees and other commitments in that report; it is a guarantee on a lease, not a facility Nvidia builds. Neither figure appears as a line item in the 10-Q we read.
• Alphabet: $871.3 billion, not $895 billion. The chart shows $75 billion of guarantees and backstops; the 10-Q gives $7.6 billion of financial guarantees and $43.8 billion of credit derivatives, or $51.4 billion by our arithmetic.
• Amazon: $285.64 billion, not $301 billion. The three commitment lines we used add up to $285.64 billion; we could not match the rest of the chart’s figure to a line in the 10-Q.
• Microsoft, Oracle, Broadcom and SpaceX match the chart to within about $1 billion each.

Set against the chart’s August figures, which it attributes to Morgan Stanley, Meta shows the largest rise: $866.46 billion against $713 billion, an increase of about $153.5 billion by our arithmetic. Nvidia’s filing figures are about $77.5 billion above the chart’s August $348 billion, and Broadcom’s about $44.8 billion above $157 billion.

The Debt Backdrop in Our Coverage

• Our piece on Meta’s commitments covers the 10-Q line in detail: $454.52 billion of non-cancelable contractual commitments at 30 September 2026, against $81.19 billion a year earlier.
• Our piece on Meta’s credit risk covers the same filing’s debt: interest expense of $977 million in the quarter, against $227 million a year earlier.
• Our piece on neocloud short sellers covers ORTEX data, reported by Reuters, showing $6 billion of paper profits for short sellers in five neocloud and data center stocks in October.
• Our AI-doubts follow-up covers the 22 October 2026 market moves in Meta, Nvidia and other AI names.

The Structural Read

As we read it, Meta’s line is the fastest-moving one we checked: its non-cancelable commitments went from $349.31 billion in the second-quarter 10-Q to $454.52 billion in the third, as our earlier piece reports.

As we read it, the chart and the filings differ most where the obligation is a guarantee rather than a purchase: our count is about $105 billion below the chart for Nvidia and about $24 billion below it for Alphabet, mainly in guarantees and backstops.

As we read it, leases are the other large engine: Microsoft’s $329.1 billion and Oracle’s $288 billion of leases not yet commenced are each larger than their purchase commitments.

Three Implications

FOR THE HYPERSCALERS Alphabet’s, Microsoft’s and Amazon’s figures here are as of 30 June 2026; each company’s next quarterly filing will replace them, as Meta’s did on 22 October 2026.

FOR CHIP SUPPLIERS Nvidia lists $279 billion of supply and capacity commitments and Broadcom $126.82 billion of purchase commitments; by our arithmetic, Nvidia’s $425.53 billion total is larger than Oracle’s or Amazon’s.

FOR GUARANTORS Broadcom lists a backstop of about $29 billion on a customer’s lease obligations and Meta $41.49 billion of maximum residual value guarantees; as we read it, these are exposures to other parties’ obligations rather than the companies’ own purchases.

The Business Engineer Lens

This story maps onto the Business Engineer framework The AI Capex Map.

The framework’s thesis: “the capex race is no longer a corporate spending cycle. It is a sovereign-scale financing problem dressed in tech-company clothing”.

As we read it, the $3.56 trillion in these filings is one measure of that financing question, and most of it is contracts and leases already signed. The framework was published in May 2026 and does not discuss these filings.

What Is Not Established

The filings cover different dates, from 30 June to 30 September 2026, so the total mixes four reporting periods. Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon report results next week, and their new filings may change these figures. Several lines are maximums or “up to” amounts that may never be paid, including Broadcom’s backstop and notes, Alphabet’s credit derivatives and Meta’s contingent cloud capacity. The figures are undiscounted.

Not every commitment is for AI: the filings also name content licences, consumer hardware and energy. We have not read the Morgan Stanley research the chart cites, and we do not know who drew the chart beyond its source line. Our grouping of line items is our own.

The Bottom Line

By our arithmetic from their latest filings, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, Amazon, Broadcom and SpaceX list about $3.56 trillion of commitments that sit off their balance sheets, close to the $3.59 trillion in a chart credited to ZeroHedge. Meta’s new 10-Q lifts it to $866.46 billion, level with Alphabet’s $871.3 billion. Our count of Nvidia, at $425.53 billion, is about $105 billion below the chart’s figure, because we could not find its $108 billion of guarantees in Nvidia’s 10-Q.