As the artificial-intelligence arms race heats up, Meta and Google have turned to Wall Street for help paying the multi-billion-dollar tab. Amid data-center financing terms that even Google’s auditor calls questionable, a Washington securities lawyer whose clients include the world’s largest proxy-advisory firm raised pointed questions with the Securities and Exchange Commission about how those increasingly complex financing arrangements are being accounted for.
William Edick, a partner at securities-law boutique Pickard Djinis and Pisarri, filed a pair of unusually detailed Freedom of Information Act requests with the SEC on July 30.
One request seeks records concerning Meta Platforms’ accounting for joint ventures with Blue Owl Capital, as well as special-purpose vehicles, variable-interest entities and Meta’s investment in Scale AI. The other seeks similar SEC accounting records involving Alphabet, Google’s parent, and its newly announced AI joint venture with private-equity giant Blackstone.
The Pickard Djinis requests were among 605 FOIA requests made to the SEC in July and captured in into PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests across 47 federal agencies and departments in as close to real-time as their availability allows.
Underlying the FOIA requests are concerns about how the biggest hyperscalers are financing the vast data centers – filled with specialized processors, enormous amounts of electricity, and cooling systems capable of keeping it all running – that AI requires. As the tech giants look for outside capital, they are crafting creative accounting strategies to keep the full scope of the investments off their income statements and balance sheets.
Meta teamed up with alternative-asset manager Blue Owl Capital to finance its giant Hyperion data-center project in Louisiana. Blue Owl holds an 80 percent interest in the joint venture and Meta 20 percent. Google is pursuing a different but related strategy with Blackstone. In May, the companies announced a venture under which Blackstone would make an initial $5 billion equity commitment to build infrastructure around Google’s Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which are specialized chips that Google designed for AI computations. The new company plans to provide 500 megawatts of computing capacity beginning in 2027.
For Google and Meta, the arrangements accomplish two things at once: Outside money gets pulled into their enormously expensive AI buildouts, and the resultant expenses are reclassified to blur their own considerable up-front investments in the project. Accountants then must determine who actually controls the ventures, who bears its financial risks, and whether some or all of the assets and liabilities belong on the technology company’s own financial statements. Those are also the questions Pickard Djinis is asking.
The financing structures have already drawn unusually pointed scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal described the assumptions supporting Meta’s its off-balance-sheet arrangement with Blue Owl as “questionable.” The Financial Times, citing Goldman Sachs, reported that AI hyperscalers have amassed $1.5 trillion in lease commitments, about $1 trillion of which are not yet reflected in their financial statements. Meta’s auditor, Ernst & Young, ultimately accepted the company’s treatment of Hyperion but flagged it as a “critical audit matter,” saying the judgment about who controls the venture was especially challenging.
Pickard Djinis specializes in securities regulation and represents a range of financial-market participants, including investment advisers, hedge funds, and institutional investors. It also has a longstanding relationship with Institutional Shareholder Services, the influential proxy-advisory firm that provides institutional investors with research and recommendations on director elections, executive compensation and shareholder proposals.
One of the two July 30 requests filed by Pickard Djinis’ Edick asked for records concerning the accounting treatment of Meta’s joint ventures with Blue Owl Capital, including special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) and variable-interest entities (VIEs), as well as Meta’s investment in Scale AI.
Specifically, Edick sought “any documents from January 1, 2023 to July 15, 2026 including, but not limited to, preclearance letters and responses, comment letters, and correspondence of, and with, the SEC Office of Chief Accountant or the SEC Division of Corporation Finance, containing information relating to the accounting treatment or proposed accounting treatment in connection with Meta Platforms, Inc’s joint venture with Blue Owl Capital, Inc., Meta Platforms’ ownership interests in any joint venture related entity, special purpose vehicle or variable interest entity, including but not limited to Scale AI, or Meta Platforms’ treatment of non-marketable equity investments under the equity method, as described in Notes 5 and 13 of Meta Platforms’ Form 10-K filed on January 29, 2026.”
The other request from Edick, regarding Alphabet, sought records involving the Google-Blackstone AI cloud venture and similar questions about joint ventures, SPVs, VIEs and other investments.
In that one, Edick asked for “any documents from January 1, 2024 to July 15, 2026 including, but not limited to, preclearance letters and responses, comment letters, and correspondence of, and with, the SEC Office of Chief Accountant or the SEC Division of Corporation Finance, containing information relating to the accounting treatment or proposed accounting treatment by Alphabet Inc of Alphabet Inc s joint venture, through Alphabet s subsidiary Google, with Blackstone Inc. and its respective ownership interest in a new U.S.-based company, and any related entity, as described in Blackstone s May 18, 2026 press release.”
There is no evidence in the FOIA requests identifying Pickard Djinis’ client. Edick didn’t respond to questions about his client, the reasons for his request, or what he hoped to learn from the documents requested from the SEC’s Chief Accountant and the agency’s Division of Corporation Finance. But the questions Edick is asking are of potential interest to institutional shareholders trying to gauge the true scale and risk of Big Tech’s AI spending.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, has also raised questions about the data-center financing boom. In June, she asked Blackstone and three other major investment firms for detailed information about their investments and ownership across the data-center supply chain; documentation of efforts to mitigate the risks of owning data centers; and an explanation of how they ensure that Americans are not exploited by those investments. Warren set a deadline of June 27 for answers, but so far hasn’t posted any responses she may have received.
The Edick FOIA requests don’t allege wrongdoing. SEC records show both requests are pending. Neither appears on the SEC’s separate FOIA log for requests involving Exemption 7(A), which permits withholding law-enforcement records when disclosure could interfere with enforcement proceedings.
But taken together, Edick’s requests spotlight an emerging question as Big Tech pours unprecedented sums into artificial intelligence: Who is actually paying for the AI boom – and where do those obligations show up on the balance sheet?
At the CFTC, Another FOIA Trail: While Edick is asking what companies are telling the SEC’s accountants, New York Times investigative reporter Sharon LaFraniere has been asking a different federal financial regulator what happened to its enforcement operation.
Her target is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the once-obscure agency that has suddenly found itself overseeing an exploding prediction-market industry.
LaFraniere has been digging into the CFTC’s treatment of prediction markets and, more broadly, what happened to the agency’s enforcement operation after President Trump returned to office. Her latest requests seek internal records concerning investigations that were closed or curtailed, including the CFTC’s controversial decision to drop an investigation of Polymarket, which has significant ties to the Trump family. Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in, and an unpaid adviser to, Polymarket; 1789 Capital, the investment firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, has invested tens of millions of dollars in Polymarket. (Recent reporting indicates the CFTC has reopened an investigation into Polymarket.)
FOIAengine has tracked LaFraniere’s FOIA requests for months. In January, she sought a broad range of records involving then-Commissioner and former acting CFTC Chair Caroline Pham. See our story, “Perp Walk: Wild West Gold Rush in a $90 Trillion Market.”)
LaFraniere’s June FOIA requests suggest she is looking beyond Polymarket at a broader question: What happened to CFTC enforcement as the new administration took control? On June 9, she requested all CFTC closing reports involving Polymarket and founder Shayne Coplan during a period in 2025. The same day, she separately requested closing reports concerning a CFTC investigation involving commodities giant Louis Dreyfus and its Allenberg Cotton operation.
On June 16, LaFraniere made another request, this time for emails among senior CFTC Enforcement Division officials concerning both Polymarket/Coplan and Louis Dreyfus/Allenberg.
The subjects of LaFraniere’s FOIA request, Louis Dreyfus and Allenberg, are embroiled in long-running private litigation over allegations that they manipulated the cotton-futures market in 2011. One case, filed by two plaintiffs who allege they lost more than $200 million after Louis Dreyfus amassed enormous positions in cotton futures and artificially inflated prices, is scheduled for trial next June. A related class action dating to 2012 also remains pending, with the court scheduling further proceedings for August. Louis Dreyfus has denied wrongdoing, arguing that the traders who lost money were attempting to shift responsibility for bad investment decisions.
Because no corresponding public CFTC enforcement case against the companies over the alleged 2011 cotton squeeze has surfaced, LaFraniere appears to be probing why the CFTC reportedly closed its investigation while private litigants continued pursuing essentially the same alleged conduct.
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Next week: A closer look at FOIA requests filed with the Food and Drug Administration.
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John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. He is the author of The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. His latest book is Summer of ’71: Five Months That Changed America, about the fateful year before Watergate. Click here to watch the official book trailer. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
