Alphabet was on track Friday for its worst week since March of 2020, during the original pandemic bear market.

The company, which upended the AI leaderboard 11 months ago in a stunning come-from-behind moment that presaged a near 40% rally in the shares, is suddenly on its heels.

The shares plunged a God-awful 12.5% after earnings, and if Friday’s early losses held, the stock would’ve managed just two gains in nine sessions. Since the record highs in May, the company’s shed $1.5 trillion in market cap.

There’s the chart. It’s pretty ugly. Over three weeks, the stock’s down nearly 20%.

This week’s drop came despite Google Cloud revenue that more than doubled YoY, topping analyst estimates and accounting for nearly a quarter of overall sales.

The impressive cloud growth was overshadowed by plunging free cash flow and concerns that AI might be eating into search results. That latter worry suggests Alphabet’s AI efforts and associated expenditures could be in some sense cannibalistic.

The figure above shows you Alphabet’s capex and FCF. The latter was negative for the second quarter in a row. Q2 marked the first time in Alphabet’s history as a public company that FCF was negative.

Obligations related to the global, multi-trillion dollar AI buildout are now so self-referential that disentangling them’s well nigh impossible.

That, in turn, makes it very difficult to assess whether robust cloud and backlog growth represent organic demand or what critics charge is tantamount to vendor financing.

If you look, for example, at Alphabet’s 10-Q, filed Thursday, you’ll find this disclosure buried 57 pages deep:

As of September 30, 2026, we have entered into contingent commitments consisting of:

• • $75.7 billion of financial support in the form of backstop obligations relating to data centers, including data center lease payments and the associated energy costs for certain agreements. Of these obligations, $48.0 billion is executed with third-party data center providers, which are accounted for as credit derivatives. $27.7 billion represents our obligation to put in place future backstops to support data center and energy supply infrastructure, of which $10.0 billion is with Crux AI, a related party.
  • $22.8 billion of financial guarantees, primarily to support counterparty procurement of long-lead time equipment for our future power purchase and energy agreements.

As Bloomberg noted, that tally — nearly $100 billion in contingent commitments — appears to be incremental. That is: On top of the more than $1 trillion in actual purchase commitments, future leases and other obligations the company described on the analyst call.

If you word search the 10-Q for “Crux AI,” you’ll discover that Alphabet’s backlog — which stood at nearly $568 billion at the end of September, up from $520 billion in Q2 — includes almost $17 billion from an agreement with the Palo Alto-based infrastructure company, which is all of seven weeks old.

You’ll never guess who’s behind Crux AI. I’m just kidding. You know where I’m going with this, right? It’s an Alphabet joint venture with Blackstone, which made an initial $5 billion equity investment. Google’s providing the hardware, which in this case means those TPUs it’s developing with Broadcom. That’d be the same Broadcom that’s providing guarantees on $40 billion in bank loans to a shell company set up to buy the same TPUs on behalf of Anthropic.

Last month, a consortium of banks including Goldman agreed to provide $22 billion in chip financing to support Blackstone and Alphabet’s efforts to get Crux AI up and running. As noted in the excerpted passage from the 10-Q, Alphabet’s pledged backstops for Crux AI are as much as $10 billion.

So, if I’m reading all of this correctly — and I’m by no means sure that I am, because it’s pretty fucking convoluted, ain’t it? — $16.8 billion of Alphabet’s revenue backlog is attributable to a two-month-old AI infrastructure startup partially owned and backstopped by Alphabet.

There’s the overall revenue backlog chart. The dramatic upward inflection’s obviously a product of Google Cloud growth.

Coming full circle, the issue is that the lack of visibility — and just to cover my ass, let me make it clear that it is visible, you just have to squint and read all the fine print from the SEC filings to see it — makes it very difficult for the average investor to determine what’s “real” and what isn’t in terms of the payoff on enormous AI outlays.

As one PM gently put it, commenting on Crux AI’s share of Alphabet’s backlog, “It would be nice if [all the growth] was coming from a bunch of outside customers.”