This article first appeared on GuruFocus.

Meta (META, Financials) and Elon Musk’s xAI are taking an unconventional route to fund their AI ambitions and it’s raising eyebrows on Wall Street.

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According to recent analysis, Meta has quietly shifted roughly $30 billion in AI-related financing off its balance sheet through special purpose vehicles, or SPVs. The arrangement, reportedly involving Blue Owl Capital, lets the company borrow heavily to build data centers and chip infrastructure without showing the full debt load on its books.

It’s a clever financial move and a risky one. Analysts warn that while SPVs can boost flexibility, they also obscure leverage, echoing strategies used before the 2008 financial crisis. UBS estimates that AI-linked debt is now growing by about $100 billion every quarter, and Morgan Stanley projects tech firms could be relying on as much as $800 billion in off-balance-sheet credit by 2028.

The trend isn’t limited to Meta. Musk’s xAI is said to be creating a $20 billion SPV to lease Nvidia (NVDA) chips, while Google is reportedly backing data center debt through crypto mining ventures. Analysts are calling it a new kind of financial alchemy where massive AI infrastructure projects are funded through opaque, debt-heavy structures that don’t immediately show up on corporate ledgers.

At the same time, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang has described what he calls the AI virtuous cycle, a self-reinforcing boom in which better AI drives more adoption, higher profits, and ever-larger data centers. That optimism, combined with aggressive financing, is fueling a gold rush that could reshape both tech and finance.