An article in FT today highlights the increasingly creative ways Big Tech are coming up with to finance their AI build-out while keeping the debt off their books.
instead of just issuing bonds off its own balance sheet, Meta formed a joint venture with Blue Owl called Beignet that would develop and own Hyperion. Meta owns just 20 per cent of Beignet, but made a rock-hard commitment to lease Hyperion for at least 20 years. That guarantee allowed Beignet to issue an amortising $27bn bond, but this debt doesn’t actually appear as debt on Meta’s balance sheet, even if it is on the hook for the payments.
Goldman Sachs ran the numbers and counted up a trillion dollars of purchase commitments which don’t appear on the balance sheets of Big Tech.
The sheer scale of AI borrowing is believed by some to impact US Government borrowing as Big Tech debt issuance competes with Government bond offerings potentially boosting interest rates at a time when the government is trying to keep interest rates low.
On top of that, AI investments plan to ‘pay off’ by replacing employees which potentially undermines future government tax receipts if employment decreases as well as potentially increasing unemployment benefit costs.
