Alphabet 季度申報文件顯示 AI 相關承諾超過 $1tn

Alphabet’s quarterly filing, published on Thursday, puts its future payments for computing, energy and data centres at more than $1tn. These Alphabet commitments do not appear on its balance sheet, the filing says.

Davey Alba reported the figures for Bloomberg. Chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi had given the $1tn-plus total on Wednesday’s earnings call, Bloomberg reported. The 10-Q filing breaks it down.

Where the $1tn goes

The largest item is $924.4bn in purchase commitments that are not on Alphabet’s balance sheet. Of that, $802.1bn covers multi-year deals for technical infrastructure and inventory, energy take-or-pay contracts and content licences. Most of those will be fulfilled through 2031, and $213.4bn is due within 12 months.

Alphabet also has $130.5bn in leases that have not started yet, mainly for data centres and energy infrastructure. They begin between 2026 and 2031 and run for one to 26 years. A further $21.9bn covers future funding for its equity investments.

Bloomberg put the leases figure at $152bn. The filing lists $130.5bn for leases and the $21.9bn of investment funding as two separate items.

For comparison, Meta’s filing last week showed about $825bn in commitments.

Guarantees on top

The filing also lists payments Alphabet could owe if certain things happen. Bloomberg counted about $98.5bn of these contingent commitments, up roughly $23bn from the previous quarter.

Alphabet backs some partners’ data centre lease payments and energy costs. The notional value of these backstops, its maximum exposure if the partners default, was $48bn at 30 September. At the end of 2025 it was $16.9bn.

Guarantees for partners buying power equipment for Google’s energy deals reached $16.2bn. Their terms now run as late as January 2049.

Some customers can also make Alphabet buy back the TPU chip systems they bought, at pre-set prices. The maximum Alphabet could pay under these terms is $6.6bn. The company says customers have no economic incentive to use the option, given the discount on repurchase.

A joint venture in the backlog

Google Cloud’s backlog of signed contracts reached $560.8bn, the figure behind its cloud revenue jump. Bloomberg reported that it was $513.9bn three months earlier.

Of the total, $16.8bn comes from a multi-year deal with Crux AI. The filing describes Crux AI as a related party, a joint venture in which Alphabet holds a minority stake. Bloomberg calculated that the deal accounts for more than a third of the quarter’s backlog growth.

Alphabet formed the venture with Blackstone in May. Blackstone has committed up to $5bn in capital. Alphabet has committed up to $10bn in data centre and energy backstops for the venture’s deals.

Agents outside their scope

In its risk factors, Alphabet describes what it has seen while testing AI models. Bloomberg reported that this was the first time Alphabet had said so.

“During model testing, we have sometimes observed unexpected behavior, including autonomous agents taking actions outside of their intended scope,” the filing says.

The filing warns that errors in one part of a multi-step AI task could compound across the workflow. That could lead to failures, unauthorised actions or other liabilities, it says. On Wednesday’s call, Sundar Pichai said Google will bring agent features to Search and to the Gemini app, which has 1 billion users.

How it pays

Alphabet held $265.1bn in cash and marketable securities at the end of September. That includes $75.2bn of SpaceX shares, which carry short-term limits on selling.

In the third quarter, Alphabet raised $28.7bn from bonds and $12.4bn from selling new shares, according to its results release. It bought back no shares, against $11.5bn a year earlier. Long-term debt rose to $125.1bn, from $46.5bn at the end of 2025.

Alphabet declined to comment to Bloomberg on the filing.