Bloomberg/Getty Images
- Meta said its future lease obligations, tied largely to AI data centers, swelled to $279 billion.
- That figure, disclosed in a Thursday securities filing, represents a 53% jump from three months earlier.
- Meta said it signed another $68 billion in AI data center leases after the quarter ended.
Meta has more than a quarter trillion dollars in future lease obligations — largely tied to AI data centers — as the tech giant races to build out its artificial intelligence infrastructure, a new regulatory filing shows.
In its quarterly securities filing released a day after its earnings report, Meta said it had approximately $278.99 billion in operating and finance leases that have not yet begun and were not yet included on its balance sheet.
The lease agreements cover "data centers, colocations, and certain network infrastructure" and were scheduled to begin between the remainder of the year through 2036, Meta said in the filing. The lease terms range from more than one year to 30 years.
The nearly $279 billion figure represents a roughly 53% jump from the $182.88 billion in future lease obligations Meta reported in its first-quarter filings three months earlier.
Meta said in its latest securities filing that in July, after the quarter ended, it entered into additional data center leases with commitments of about $68 billion. Those leases are expected to begin in 2027 and 2028 with lease terms of 18 to 20 years, the company said.
The disclosures offer another glimpse into the extraordinary scale of Meta's AI infrastructure push.
Earlier this month, the owner of Facebook and Instagram announced plans to expand what was already expected to be its largest AI data center. Meta said that the Louisiana data center, known as Hyperion, will grow to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, bringing the project's anticipated cost to more than $50 billion.
On Meta's second-quarter earnings call Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said a "significant portion" of the company's computing capacity will be used to train its AI models, power AI agents, and support its core business. Zuckerberg added that Meta also expects to "grow a large business serving large customers as well."
Separate from its future lease obligations, Meta reported $349.31 billion in non-cancelable contractual commitments comprising both short-term and long-term arrangements.
"These commitments mostly relate to third-party cloud capacity arrangements and investments in servers and network infrastructure, data centers, and consumer hardware products in Reality Labs, with approximately $53.52 billion and $81.65 billion due in 2026 and 2027, respectively," Meta said in its filing.
Meta also said it has contingent obligations to purchase up to $14.72 billion of cloud capacity over the next five years. Those commitments "may be reduced if the cloud service provider is able to sell such capacity to other customers," Meta said.
Read the original article on Business Insider