On Wednesday's earnings call, Alphabet finance chief Anat Ashkenazi put a number on the build-out that the income statement does not show: $924 billion of future purchase commitments, plus about $152 billion of leases that have not started. She called them "maximum contractual obligations" and noted that several carry variable pricing and volume, "which could result in lower spend".
The 10-Q filed on Thursday breaks the figure apart. It also shows a detail the call did not dwell on: part of Google Cloud's contract backlog is owed by a company Alphabet part-owns and has agreed to backstop.
What the obligations are
- Purchase commitments: $924.4bn, of which $802.1bn is multi-year deals for technical infrastructure and inventory, energy take-or-pay contracts and content licences, mostly fulfilled through 2031. $213.4bn falls due within 12 months.
- Leases not yet commenced: $130.5bn, mainly data centres and energy, starting between 2026 and 2031 with terms of one to 26 years.
- Future funding for equity investments: $21.9bn.
Three months earlier those lines read $811.0bn, $200.7bn short-term, and $85.2bn of unstarted leases. The forward cash call grew $113.4bn in a quarter; the lease book grew $45.3bn.
Set the short-dated piece beside the cash engine: trailing operating cash flow is $179.6bn against $213.4bn of commitments due inside a year. That is not a liquidity problem, because most of these commitments are the capital spending already under way rather than spending on top of it. It is a statement about ordering - Alphabet has locked in the suppliers before the buyers.
The part not owed to a stranger
Below the commitments sit the contingent ones, newly grouped in this filing. Alphabet carries $75.7bn of backstops tied to data centres, including lease payments and energy costs. Of that, $48.0bn is already executed with third-party data-centre providers and recorded as credit derivatives; another $27.7bn is its obligation to put future backstops in place, and $10.0bn of that is with Crux AI, named in the filing as a related party.
Add $22.8bn of financial guarantees, mostly supporting counterparties buying long-lead-time equipment for Google's power agreements; the power leg alone runs to January 2049 and Note 10 puts that subset at $16.2bn. Then there is a repurchase obligation on TPU hardware already sold, capped at $6.6bn. At the end of 2025 those first two lines were $16.9bn and $5.7bn.
The third of the backlog
Google Cloud's backlog reached $560.8bn, from $513.9bn three months earlier. The filing discloses that $16.8bn of the total comes from a multi-year commercial agreement with Crux AI, an unconsolidated equity-method joint venture and a related party. That is roughly 36% of the quarter's $46.9bn increase.
Crux AI is the venture formed with Blackstone in May: Blackstone has committed up to $5bn of capital, Alphabet holds a minority stake and calls the carrying value "not material", and Alphabet has committed up to $10bn of data-centre and energy backstops to support deals the venture signs.
The venture is a neocloud, renting Google's own TPUs to customers with 500MW of capacity targeted for 2027. Ten banks are providing a $22bn chip loan, and the build has slipped at some sites - Bloomberg reported delays at locations meant to run Google silicon, including a Wyoming campus Google took over from Crusoe. Venture chief executive Benjamin Treynor Sloss says the 500MW target is on track.
Nothing here is concealed: the related-party status, the backstop ceiling and the backlog contribution are all disclosed. But the mechanism deserves naming. Alphabet sells the chips, guarantees the leases and the power, and books the venture's commitment as contracted future cloud revenue. A backlog that includes a customer you financed is a weaker claim on the future than a backlog of strangers.
The counter-case
Management's own defence is the strongest one: these are maximum obligations, several with flexibility. Commitments are not debt. Debt did grow, though - long-term borrowings of $125.1bn against $46.5bn at the end of 2025, after $45.0bn of dollar notes and $35.8bn of foreign-currency notes in nine months, with no buybacks and free cash flow of negative $9.1bn in the quarter. Depreciation is still catching up too: $22.0bn in nine months against $132.0bn of capital spending, so the earnings drag from these builds is ahead, not behind.
Meta's filing last week showed about $825bn of its own commitments, so the structure is not unique to Google. That makes the next disclosures the interesting ones.
What is still unconfirmed
Alphabet does not say when the Crux AI contract converts to revenue, what share of the venture's capacity it covers, or how much of the remaining $27.7bn of future backstops sits outside Crux. It does not say whether 500MW survives the site delays. Amazon reports Thursday and will show whether the same pattern appears in its backlog.
This post will be updated when Amazon's numbers land, when Crux AI discloses customers, and when Alphabet files its 10-K in February.
Sources
- Alphabet Form 10-Q, quarter ended 30 September 2026 - SEC EDGAR
- Alphabet Form 10-Q, quarter ended 30 June 2026 - SEC EDGAR, comparison basis
- Alphabet Form 10-K, year ended 31 December 2025 - SEC EDGAR
- Alphabet Q3 2026 earnings release - SEC EDGAR
- Alphabet's AI commitments pass $1tn, its quarterly filing shows - The Next Web, citing Bloomberg
- Banks provide $22 billion chip loan to Blackstone, Alphabet cloud venture - Reuters
- Google and Blackstone JV experiences delays in data center projects - Data Center Dynamics
- AI build-out hits snag as Google and Microsoft put off raising capex forecasts - CNBC
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