By Matt Tracy
WASHINGTON, March 17 (Reuters) – Analysts anticipate a higher supply of debt being raised by the Big Five hyperscaler companies this year as they race to build out their data center infrastructure, following Amazon’s near-record bond sale last week of roughly $54 billion in investment-grade bonds.
Hyperscalers, which operate vast data centers and other infrastructure to facilitate AI training and deployment, have been raising debt to finance data centers needed to fuel the boom in AI.
“There continues to be an expectation of a lot of capital to be raised in this sector,” said John Servidea, co-head of investment-grade debt capital markets at JPMorgan, which led the Amazon deal.
“Whether it’s the companies’ publicly stated capex budgets, or whether it’s various banks’ estimates of the amount of hyperscaler issuance, if you look at all of those, a realistic expectation would be that at some point there’s more,” Servidea added.
Analysts at BofA Global Research on Friday raised their forecast for the hyperscalers’ new debt in 2026 to $175 billion from $140 billion. In early February, Barclays analysts said that U.S. investment-grade corporate bond issuance could be greater than $2 trillion in 2026, which they said “would exceed even the post‑COVID record levels seen in 2020.”
The five major AI hyperscalers – Amazon, Alphabet’s Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle – issued $121 billion in U.S. corporate bonds last year, versus an average $28 billion per year between 2020 and 2024, according to a January report by BofA Securities. Microsoft and Oracle declined to comment, while the other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Hyperscalers made up four of the five biggest U.S. high-grade bond deals in 2025, according to a December report by MUFG analysts. Most of those took place in the second half of the year.
Oracle sold $18 billion in bonds in September. This was followed in October by Meta’s $30 billion deal and November deals from Alphabet ($17.5 billion) and Amazon ($15 billion).
This year saw a $31.51 billion global bond raise by Alphabet in February, which included a rare 100-year “century” bond as part of the deal.
Most recently, Amazon raised about $37 billion across 11 tranches in the U.S. bond market on March 10. This was followed the next day by a 14.5 billion euro-denominated ($16.8 billion) bond raise by the company.
The overwhelming demand – nearly four times the total amount sold – for Amazon’s bond sale underlines investor appetite for debt from the major hyperscalers.
Market participants believe the actual and expected debt raise by hyperscalers will keep forecasts for potential record-breaking overall U.S. corporate debt issuance on track, despite quiet days in the primary market preceding and following the escalation of conflict on February 28 between Iran and U.S.-Israeli forces.
“It’s fertile ground right now in capital markets, and you’re also in the first half of the year,” said George Catrambone, head of fixed income, Americas, at asset manager DWS.
(Reporting by Matt Tracy in Washington; Editing by Megan Davies and Andrea Ricci )
Comments