Big Tech credit risks rise sharply as AI spending pushes debt to $350 billion

The biggest names in tech have been on a borrowing binge that makes their old spending habits look quaint. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, the so-called hyperscalers, have collectively issued approximately $121 billion in new corporate bonds in 2025 to fund AI infrastructure. The previous annual average was roughly $28 billion. In other words, these five companies borrowed in one year what they used to borrow in more than four. The debt wall nobody saw coming Over $90 billion of that $121 billion total hit the market in just the final three months of 2025. Over the past five years, the collective debt load across these five companies has roughly doubled, reaching an estimated $350 billion. AI-related debt now represents around 30% of net new issuance in the US investment-grade bond market. When nearly a third of new high-quality corporate bonds are effectively bets on the same technological thesis, the word “diversified” starts losing its meaning. What $121 billion buys you The money is flowing into data centers, servers, and GPU clusters, the physical backbone of the generative AI race. Investor sentiment is shifting By mid-2026, investor concerns around longer-date...