The AI build-out, read from the filings

They report $721B of debt. They have promised $1.06T.

"Reported debt" is what sits on the balance sheet as borrowings. But filings also commit money through leases and signed purchase deals. Add those and the promised total is 47% larger than the debt line alone. Committed obligations exceed reported debt by 1.5x. The gap shows that liabilities outside reported debt add substantial pressure to the balance sheet.

Largest 14 by total promised, latest quarter (9 smaller companies not shown)

Industry total over time

Money earned, money collected early, money merely signed

Deferred revenue is cash collected for work not yet delivered — it is not earned yet. Signed backlog is orders promised but not yet delivered or paid; it overlaps deferred, so we never add the two. Backlog now stands at $2.42T against $2.81T of trailing-year revenue. Backlog equals 0.9x one year of revenue, while deferred revenue adds another $237.9 billion of future obligations. The committed pile therefore extends well beyond the revenue already earned in the trailing year.

Deferred revenue as a share of yearly revenue — the median company

What they spend on, what they earn from

Four lines carry almost all reported spending: making the product, inventing the next one (R&D), selling and running the company, and tax. Stock-based pay — $117B in 2025 — hides inside those lines, so we show it beside them, never as a fifth slice. Cloud & platforms generated $1.90 trillion, far more than Chips at $574.2 billion and Hardware & networking at $228.5 billion. On the spending side, cost of revenue was $974.4 billion, while cash capital spending reached $302.2 billion.

Share of reported operating spend, by year

The cash story the expense lines miss: building vs inventing

Not every company tags every line; each sum covers only the companies that tag it (always more than half the industry).

Trailing-year revenue by group

One honest gap: filings publish per-segment revenue in a tagged data layer this pipeline does not parse yet, so this paper groups revenue by what each company builds, not by each company's own segment names.

$3.46T comes due in five years

Every dated obligation in the filings, stacked by when it falls due. Dark blue money has a filed payment schedule. Light blue money has a due date but no schedule, so its timing is a labeled straight-line estimate. Gray money is promised for "after year five" with no date at all — we refuse to invent one. The next five years carry $3.46 trillion of obligations against $918.4 billion of revenue promised for that same period. Filings show a much larger payment wall than the revenue scheduled to arrive.

Against it: revenue already promised to them (backlog with dates)

The contrast is the finding: companies schedule spending decades out, but dated revenue promises barely reach past five years. Filings also show $265B of financing flowing back — money lent out that should return. We keep it out of the wall; a promise to receive is not a promise to pay.

Promises are growing faster than revenue

Each line starts at 100 in 2021-Q1 so the slopes compare fairly. Committed obligations grew 16% per year, faster than revenue at 15% and reported debt at 14%. That makes commitments the fastest-growing major balance in the comparison.

How often the filed numbers moved

Our reconciler re-states each quarter using only evidence cited from the company's own filings: revenue that is really conditional moves out, spending that is really committed moves over. It changed 291 of 803 company-quarters. Reconciliation changed the as-filed numbers in 291 of 803 quarters. Extraction disagreements were the leading flag type, with 84 cases.

Industry expenses: as filed vs after cited reconciliation, by year

349 flags across 34 companies

A flag is a pattern worth a second look, not an accusation: a claim that appears once and vanishes, a metric that quietly changes definition, financing that circles back as revenue. Every flag cites the exact filing text.

How this was made

Code owns every number: exact figures come from SEC's machine-readable XBRL data, and all sums, growth rates, and date math are computed, never estimated by a model. AI reads the narrative text — commitments buried in notes, related-party deals, guarantees — and every claim it catalogs cites its source filing.

Limits worth knowing: industry stats cover the 31 US-dollar filers only; ASML (euros), TSMC (Taiwan dollars) and Nebius's earlier ruble filings stay out of the averages. Money moved through third parties without disclosure is invisible to filings, so the ratio flags are the proxy. Dollar charts sum the industry; ratio charts use the median company so no giant can hide the typical story.

The same questions, one company at a time

AI software

Chip equipment

Chips

Cloud & platforms

Hardware & networking

Data centers

Aerospace