Big Tech faces rising financing costs amid AI spending surge

For years, Big Tech companies printed cash faster than they could spend it. Those days are over. The AI infrastructure buildout has turned the industry’s most profitable companies into some of the bond market’s most prolific borrowers, and the cost of all that debt is climbing. The combined debt of the five largest US data-center spenders, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle, has ballooned to roughly $350 billion over the past five years. Their collective interest expenses topped $10 billion in the last year alone, more than double what they were paying in 2019. The debt machine revs up Goldman Sachs estimates that AI-related corporate debt issuance will hit approximately $141 billion in 2025. That figure is being driven by blockbuster bond deals from Meta, Alphabet, and Oracle, companies that historically financed their growth through cash flows rather than credit markets. Meta’s recent $12.5 billion bond offering for a Texas data center carried notably higher yields than Meta’s comparable bond issuance earlier in 2025. Oracle’s credit default swap spreads have also been widening, signaling that the market views the risk of lending to these companies as incrementally hig...