FT Finds $300B of AI Datacenter Exposure Sitting Off Big Tech Balance Sheets via Residual Value Guarantees

Financial Times (corroborated by Seeking Alpha and Traders Union)·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

The Financial Times reported on September 20 that technology companies have written as much as $300 billion in guarantees over the past year to finance AI datacenters and chips, mostly through special-purpose vehicles that hold the debt so the guarantor does not book it. The instrument is a residual value guarantee: if the facility or its chips are eventually sold below an agreed value, the tech company covers the shortfall. Named examples include Meta's roughly $28 billion guarantee behind about $27 billion of debt for the Hyperion project in Louisiana, and Nvidia's $105 billion of guarantees tied to a SoftBank datacenter build for OpenAI.