How Tech's Biggest Companies Are Offloading the Risks of the A.I. Boom

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/technology/ai-risks-debt.html

https://archive.ph/WwJRg

How Tech’s Biggest Companies Are Offloading the Risks of the A.I. Boom
The data centers used for work on artificial intelligence can cost tens of billions to build. Tech giants are finding ways to avoid being on the hook for some of those costs.
By Karen Weise and Eli Tan
Dec. 15, 2025, 10:49 a.m. ET

This fall, Microsoft announced a series of deals, totaling tens of billions, to lease computer power for its artificial intelligence ambitions. Meta secured almost $30 billion in financing to build a massive data center in Louisiana without taking on the debt itself. Google also committed to rent computing power from a small company and then sell some of it to OpenAI.

Those deals had one thing in common: They allowed companies that make massive quarterly profits to reduce their financial exposure to the frenetic, global buildup of data centers.

They also signaled new ways the biggest companies in tech are maneuvering to push some of the risk of the A.I. boom onto the shoulders of upstarts eager for a piece of the action. The moves let companies like Meta and Microsoft add computing power quickly and then wait to see how demand for A.I. shapes up before committing to projects that can last for decades.

Trillions of dollars are at stake as tech companies try to predict how much computing power A.I. will demand years down the line. If the big companies decide they don’t really need all that computing after the deals are over, the smaller companies and their lenders will be stuck with the consequences.

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