Off-Balance Sheet Liabilities: More Data

Earlier this week we had a post about Oracle’s ($ORCL) exposure to off-balance sheet leasing commitments, and particularly how those amounts have soared to an eye-popping $99.8 billion in recent months — none of it included on Oracle’s balance sheet.

That post made us wonder: what other companies have similar off-balance sheet arrangements, and in what amounts? 

Typically that information is hard to find. Analysts need to sift through a company’s quarterly report, and the number is usually buried away at the bottom of a page somewhere in a footnote near the end of the filing. That’s how Oracle disclosed its $99.8 billion, for example. 

Thankfully, Calcbench can help you leapfrog all that work to get to the good stuff. All those off-balance sheet disclosures are also tagged in XBRL. So if you just search by XBRL tag — which Calcbench lets you do — the numbers pop up quickly and easily.

The exact tag is:

 "UnrecordedUnconditionalPurchaseObligationBalanceSheetAmount"

We searched the S&P 500 for all firms that reported numbers using that tag, and did a time-series of data for the last seven quarters (that is, since the start of 2024) to see how those off-balance sheet commitments have changed over time. The result is Figure 1, below.

Hooo boy, that’s a lot of information for a single chart. Several points jump out.

First, notice that the tech giants are racking up lots of off-balance sheet commitments, almost all of it for data centers to run artificial intelligence. We thought Oracle’s $99.8 billion was eye-popping, but the numbers for  Amazon ($AMZN) and Microsoft ($MSFT) are even larger. And while Meta’s ($META) off-balance sheet numbers are lower, those numbers are growing rapidly. 

Second, it’s interesting to see that tech companies involved in the AI arms race aren’t the only ones carrying off-balance sheet commitments, but those other companies incur off-balance sheet commitments in a very different way. 

United Airlines ($UAL), Delta Air Lines ($DAL), JetBlue ($JBLU), Alaska Air ($ALK) — they all have off-balance sheet commitments to lease aircraft sometime in the future, but the lease amounts are relatively steady. It’s much the same for Netflix ($NFLX), too: commitments for future content, but commitments that are relatively stable from one quarter to the next. 

So at least for the airlines, Netflix, and other non-tech giants, you can see a logic there. People will continue to fly and watch more seasons of “Bridgerton,” so the airlines and Netflix need to line up resources to meet that future demand. 

Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and other “hyperscalers” making bets on AI are different. It’s not clear that demand for AI will scale up to match those data center commitments, or that the macro-economics of AI will be sustainable over the long term. 

How to Find This Stuff

Finding the numbers for off-balance sheet disclosures is easy enough. As we said above, you can search by tag and quickly find all filers that report something using that tag.

For example, you can go to the Multi-Company search page and start typing “unrecorded” in the XBRL tag search field on your screen. A dozen possible tags show up; just select the disclosure that interests you, and you’ll see all filers who used it in the period you’re searching. See Figure 2, below.

You could run the same search in a more refined way on our Raw XBRL Data page, although this page assumes you already know the exact tag you want to search. (If you don’t know the name of the tag, one cheat code is to find that disclosure in a filing somewhere and click on the number, which should be hyper-linked. That will open a small box at the bottom of your screen that explains what the tag for that disclosure is. Copy that tag name and paste it into the XBRL search page.) 

Once you find that off-balance sheet number, there’s still the question of exactly what that number is about. That’s easy. You can use our Trace feature by clicking on the result and that will open a box to the exact footnote that explains what the number is about.

Figure 3, below, shows how it works. We searched for “Unrecorded Unconditional Purchase Obligations” (one of the common tags for off-balance sheet disclosures) among the S&P 500 in Q2 2025. Meta reported $52.56 billion worth of such obligations. We clicked on that amount, and a box opened to the footnote disclosure, which tells us that the amount is “mostly for data centers, certain network infrastructure, and colocations” — that is, data center stuff.

So what are the risks to all these off-balance sheet commitments? That’s a subject for another post, and other analysts. But Calcbench has all the data you need to ask (and hopefully answer) such questions.