Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet have signed about $851 billion in leases, mostly for data centers, that have not yet begun, according to quarterly filings the three companies made with the Securities and Exchange Commission this month. At the end of 2025, the same disclosures totaled about $317 billion.
Microsoft reported $364.6 billion in leases that had not commenced as of September 30, up from $329.1 billion at the end of June and $155.1 billion at the end of December. They will start between its 2027 and 2034 fiscal years, and some depend on contractual conditions being met. Meta’s figure was about $355.7 billion, up from $279.0 billion in June and $103.8 billion at the end of 2025, covering data centers, energy infrastructure, colocation space and network infrastructure, with leases starting through 2036. Alphabet’s rose to $130.5 billion, from $85.2 billion in June and $58.5 billion at the end of 2025, for data centers and energy infrastructure starting by 2031.
The amounts are future payments spread over lease terms of up to 30 years, not spending in any single year, and none of the three yet carries them as lease liabilities on its balance sheet. Together they grew by about $158 billion in the third quarter.
The leases come on top of direct spending. Alphabet’s purchases of property and equipment reached $51.4 billion in the quarter, more than double the $24.0 billion a year earlier. Its free cash flow was negative $9.1 billion, following negative $5.9 billion in the second quarter. Meta spent $34.9 billion, including principal payments on finance leases, and reported free cash flow of negative $2.1 billion. Microsoft’s additions to property and equipment doubled to $39.4 billion, but its $58.0 billion in cash from operations still covered them.
Neither Alphabet nor Meta bought back any stock in the first nine months of the year, and both are raising outside capital. In June, Alphabet raised $20.5 billion in a public stock offering, $10.0 billion in a private placement with a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate and $19.0 billion from mandatory convertible preferred stock. Its filing says proceeds from the public offering and the preferred stock will go to general corporate purposes, “including capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute.” It has also sold about $81 billion of bonds this year.
Meta priced two offerings on October 26, five days after it created a non-voting class of stock to raise capital without diluting Mark Zuckerberg’s control. In the first, banks sold 40 million borrowed shares of Class A stock at $625 each under forward sale agreements, and Meta expects to receive about $24.9 billion when it settles them, no later than November 2027. In the second, Meta sold $12.5 billion of mandatory convertible preferred stock. The prospectus says chipmakers Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom indicated interest in buying up to $5 billion of the common stock at the offering price, though those indications were not binding. Meta said it will use the money for general corporate purposes. Its filing for the new share class said management’s forecasts showed a need to raise hundreds of billions of dollars over several years, “beginning as early as fall 2026.”
Microsoft repaid $4.9 billion of debt and spent $4.4 billion on buybacks in the quarter. On October 29, it filed a preliminary prospectus for a bond sale in 10 parts. The filing does not give a size and says the proceeds may be used for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures.
Sources: Microsoft 10-Q, Meta 10-Q, Alphabet 10-Q
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team