October 11, 2026

AI Funding

AI Capability Races Ahead of the Business Payoff | American Enterprise Institute– www.aei.org
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The state of the AI revolution can be confusing. At times, it can seem as if the latest artificial intelligence models are showing huge capability increases. One example is when two OpenAI models broke out of the lab, accessed the internet, and broke into another AI company. Or, as a Wall Street Journal headline put it, “The Day the Bots Broke Loose.”

But then you might come across another headline from the Wall Street Journal: “Big Companies Are Starting to Hire Again, Defying Predictions of AI Wipeout.” And from that piece:

The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing corporate messaging during much of the AI era. Major employers largely held back on adding people due to economic uncertainties or a belief that artificial intelligence could shoulder more tasks on the job. But some executives say the costs and limitations of AI now demand that more people be added; others want to hire people back following layoffs.

A surge in hidden debt among AI giants like Oracle and Meta is setting off alarms in the industry. The hidden debt comes from future payment operations for expenses not yet online to make money. For instance, leases and property taxes must be paid on sites that are earmarked for databases that haven’t been built or completely built yet. The hidden debt amounts to more than $1.65 trillion.

The AI Illusion: Big Tech’s ‘Invisible Debt’ Surges To $1.65 Trillion On Opaque Funding – NDTV Profit– news.google.com
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The hidden $1.65 trillion stems from future payment obligations-such as long-term operating leases for data centers not yet built, bulk GPU supply contracts, and joint ventures. Under current accounting standards, companies are not required to record these obligations as liabilities on their balance sheets until the assets are delivered or the facilities go live.

Instead, these financial commitments are buried in the small-print footnotes of their financial statements. While perfectly legal, this practice effectively obscures the true financial leverage of the companies. By shifting costs to future periods, tech giants can maintain balance sheets and inflate current profit figures, all while locking themselves into hundreds of billions of dollars in future payouts.

While all five giants are utilizing these financial structures, the report reveals that the scale of hidden debt at Meta and Oracle is particularly striking:

Meta: The social media giant’s off-balance-sheet debt has reached an estimated $420 billion, nearly three times its officially recorded debt. A significant driver is its joint venture with Blue Owl Capital to build a massive data center in Louisiana, a project whose expected investment recently ballooned from $27 billion to over $50 billion.

Oracle: The company’s hidden debt has surged more than 30-fold in four years, reaching $273.3 billion. Much of this is tied to concentrated, single-counterparty exposure, such as its massive “Stargate” supercomputer data center project with OpenAI.

Meanwhile, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have collectively disclosed backlogs of roughly $1.45 trillion for cloud services and related business commitments as of March, according to the report.

 

U.S. pledges $5 billion to boost AI in government-backed scientific research– www.scientificamerican.com
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Overall federal funding for scientific research is set to decline in 2027, the most senior White House science figure said on Wednesday. The government, however, pledged to spend $5 billion on promoting artificial intelligence in science.

Michael Kratsios, the White House’s science and technology adviser, told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the money will be drawn from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA, as well as other federal agencies.

The goal is to produce “the premier AI for science ecosystem in the world,” he said. The funding will be earmarked for “research awards, funding opportunities, specialized scientific datasets and research facilities,” the White House said in a statement.

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Scaling AI Safety Research for a Multi-Agent World

For the past decade, we’ve focused on making individual AI models more capable, helpful and safe. Today, Google DeepMind — together with Schmidt Sciences, the Cooperative AI Foundation, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and supported by Google.org — is announcing a new technical research funding call of up to $10M for researchers worldwide.

As AI technology scales, we’re entering a new era. Soon, millions of AI agents — built by different organizations — will interact across digital environments, communicating, negotiating and transacting with one another.

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