Microsoft to Report Azure Revenue in Dollars as Cramer Questions AI Dependence

Technology companies have provided as much as $300 billion in guarantees to finance artificial intelligence data centers and chips over the past year, helping support the construction boom without immediately recording most of the exposure as debt, the Financial Times reported Sunday. Meta pioneered the use of residual value guarantees for a major data center project last year, and Broadcom has since used them to support chip sales connected to Anthropic, while Nvidia has offered similar backing for infrastructure serving OpenAI and other customers. The guarantees set a minimum future value for computing equipment or data centers owned by special-purpose entities, and if an asset is eventually sold or leased for less than that amount, the technology company may have to cover part of the shortfall. Morgan Stanley estimates that seven major cloud and chip companies have accumulated more than $3.1 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments and other forms of credit support. Broadcom provided about $29 billion in backing for a special-purpose vehicle that will buy chips and lease them to Anthropic, Nvidia offered to support as much as 25% of certain financing packages and provided $105 billion in guarantees to SB Energy for an Ohio data center campus intended for OpenAI, and Meta supplied a $28 billion guarantee for its Hyperion data center venture with Blue Owl in Louisiana. Credit-rating agencies assess how much the promised value exceeds an asset's likely price under stressed conditions and may add that difference to their leverage calculations, and while analysts generally have concluded the assets provide enough collateral to limit expected losses, investors will need to monitor whether that remains true as AI hardware ages and financing commitments grow.