Meta, Nvidia, Broadcom and other technology companies have issued up to $300 billion of guarantees tied to AI data centers and chips over the past year, according to a new Financial Times investigation. Instead of borrowing all that money directly, companies are increasingly backing debt raised by separate financing vehicles.
How $300 Billion Stays Off the Balance Sheet
The key instrument is called a residual value guarantee.
Imagine investors lend billions to build an AI data center. Big Tech promises that if the facility or its chips eventually have to be sold and fetch less than an agreed value, the technology company will cover some of the shortfall.
Because the debt belongs primarily to a special-purpose vehicle rather than the guarantor, much of the exposure does not initially appear as ordinary debt.
Meta helped popularize the structure with its Hyperion data-center project in Louisiana, providing a roughly $28 billion guarantee that supported about $27 billion of project debt. Broadcom later took on about $29 billion of exposure around financing for chips destined for Anthropic, while Nvidia provided $105 billion in guarantees connected to a SoftBank data-center development for OpenAI.
This expands on a problem Coinpaper examined in who is actually financing the $3.6 trillion AI data-center boom: AI infrastructure is increasingly being funded through bonds, leases, private credit and structured financing rather than corporate cash alone.
The Risk Appears If AI Demand Disappoints
These guarantees may never become large losses.
If AI data centers remain heavily utilized and GPUs retain strong resale values, the underlying assets could cover most of the debt even if a project runs into trouble.
The danger appears if AI demand slows while enormous amounts of infrastructure are already built.
Unused data centers could fall in value. Older GPUs could depreciate faster than expected. If assets are then worth less than the guaranteed amount, Big Tech could suddenly have to absorb losses that investors did not initially see as conventional debt.
That is why credit-rating agencies still examine the guarantees even when accounting rules keep much of them away from headline balance-sheet liabilities.
Coinpaper has already looked at the same pressure from the borrower side, including what happens if AI revenue fails to catch up with data-center debt and CoreWeave’s recent multi-billion-dollar convertible debt raise.
