Nvidia in its Q2 F1/27 10-Q filing disclosed $530 billion of gross off-balance sheet guarantees – a jump from $184 billion of obligations disclosed in Q1, and an amount nearly 6x larger than its on-balance sheet liabilities.

Morgan Stanley coined the phrase “balance sheet-as-a-service” for Nvidia’s model of using its own financial strength to fund customers’ hardware purchases and data-center builds. Others refer to Nvidia as the “central bank of AI” as it takes on the massive infrastructure, power, and real estate risks that traditional lenders and VCs don’t want to. With a $346 billion single-quarter expansion, Nvidia is said to be financing a large chunk of the AI revolution.

According to SemiAnalysis, the major parts of the expansion to watch include:

– $279B for securing high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced packaging capacity supply and capacity commitments

– $108.5B in guarantees on SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike campus for (4.25 GW leased to OpenAI for 20 years)

– $36B in AI cloud “take-or-pay” financial floors underpinning specialized “Neocloud” providers (Firmus, SharonAI)

– $20B in datacenter leases, with Nvidia as the primary tenant but with plans to assign the capacity to 3rd-party developers.

Of course, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle also play the large-scale off-balance-sheet game, with SEC filings and Wall Street credit notes showing hyperscalers accumulating about $1.65 trillion in off-balance-sheet obligations. Because that outweighs the $1.35 trillion in total debt they officially reported on their balance sheets, some warn of a hidden debt crisis, even though the practice is legal under under current U.S. SEC rules.