Major technology companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, and Broadcom, are leveraging corporate guarantees to finance the construction of AI data centers and the acquisition of AI chips, effectively keeping an estimated $300 billion of this debt off their main balance sheets. This strategy involves the creation of special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) that raise debt and own the infrastructure, while the tech giants provide residual value guarantees or support lease payments. This allows the SPVs to secure funding at lower rates, often only 1-1.5 percentage points above the guarantor's own debt cost, because the lenders are relying on the credit strength of the Big Tech company.
For example, Alphabet's data center lease guarantees surged from $16.9 billion to $43.8 billion in six months, yet less than 2% of this exposure is booked on its balance sheet. Similarly, Meta's $50 billion Hyperion data center project in Louisiana is structured through an SPV, Beignet Investor, majority-owned by Blue Owl Capital. This SPV secured approximately $27 billion in loans from investors like Pimco, BlackRock, and Apollo, with Meta holding a 20% stake and providing about $28 billion in residual value guarantees. The debt remains on the SPV's books, not Meta's, and Meta even split its leases into four-year segments to avoid them being classified as long-term debt by rating agencies.
Nvidia has also employed this financing model, providing guarantees of up to $105 billion to SB Energy for data centers in Ohio that OpenAI will lease. Broadcom has a similar arrangement for its AI XPV platform, with a maximum potential liability of about $29 billion under lease-support agreements. While these structures enable rapid expansion of AI infrastructure, rating agencies are beginning to factor these off-balance-sheet obligations into their leverage assessments. Doug Kolandrea, a senior director at KBRA, notes that this significantly complicates the companies' credit risk profiles, as the economic risk of potential shortfalls or tenant defaults ultimately rests with the guarantors.
