Nikkei

Nikkei: Tech Giants Accumulate $1.65T in Hidden AI Debt

Analysis by Nikkei Asia found that five major US tech companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle — are linked to about $1.65 trillion of off‑balance‑sheet debt tied to AI and data‑center investments, atop roughly $1.35 trillion of reported liabilities. Hyperscalers shift financing into separate entities and long‑term lease or purchase commitments with data‑center operators—often special‑purpose vehicles funded by private‑credit managers such as Blue Owl, Apollo and Blackstone—partly financed by public pension funds (e.g., CalSTRS) and insurers. The structure may mask leverage and transmit risk to retirement savers and the broader financial system; the Bank for International Settlements has warned of systemic exposure. US senators have urged Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to probe private‑credit exposure, even as the Office of Financial Research faces staffing and budget cuts. Meta and Oracle are noted as particularly exposed.

Apple Plans Five iPhones Through 2027, Eyes Chinese Chips

Apple plans to introduce at least five new iPhone models between the second half of 2026 and the first half of 2027, and has increased its planned production of foldable iPhones to about 10 million units, Nikkei Asia reported. The company has secured components for roughly 80 million smartphones for H2 2026 and its total smartphone production for 2026 is expected to exceed 220 million units. Bloomberg reported Apple is in talks to source memory chips for devices sold in China from Chinese manufacturers ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies; those negotiations were described as ongoing and Apple has not confirmed them. The reporting frames these moves against an industrywide memory shortage driven by AI datacenter demand and notes Apple’s scale gives it stronger sourcing power than many Chinese rivals.

48% of Dependencies Are Unmaintained — SCA Tools Miss It

Kota Kanbe presented research at VulnCon 2026 showing that conventional SCA/vulnerability scanners (Trivy, Snyk, Grype) miss a large class of risk: unmaintained packages. Analysis of ~16,000 packages across ~100 organizations (published in Nikkei, March 2026) found 48.5% of production dependencies exhibit lifecycle risk (40.6% Active, 10.9% Legacy-Safe, 34.6% Stalled, 13.9% EOL). Kanbe released uzomuzo, an open-source tool (Apache 2.0) that classifies package lifecycle in seven stages using signals from deps.dev, the GitHub API and registry heuristics, evaluates build integrity, prioritizes removals, and integrates with CI. He demonstrates scanning (e.g., HashiCorp Vault: 209 deps, 11 EOL) and uses an LLM to trace data flow and produce attack scenarios. uzomuzo provides commands for scanning, prioritizing removal, and CI gating.