Wall Street seeks $7.5T for AI buildout over five years

The numbers being thrown around for AI infrastructure spending have officially entered “too big to comprehend” territory. McKinsey projects $7 trillion in total data center investment by 2030, with roughly $5.2 trillion of that earmarked specifically for AI workloads. To put that in perspective, $7 trillion is more than the GDP of every country on Earth except the US and China. And here’s the thing: most of this isn’t being funded with cash on hand. Debt instruments are doing the heavy lifting, making up about 75% of the financing model by some estimates. Credit spreads are widening, order books are thinning, and the financial plumbing that’s supposed to carry all this capital is starting to groan under the weight. The hyperscaler spending spree The companies writing the biggest checks are the usual suspects. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are expected to spend between $660 billion and $700 billion on AI-related infrastructure in 2026 alone. Across the broader industry, that figure could exceed $1 trillion in a single year. Alphabet and its peers have reportedly issued $159 billion in bonds to finance data center and AI investments in 2026, a massive jump from prior years. The bond ...