Behind the glamour of chatbots and blockbuster model launches, a quieter drama is unfolding in the credit markets. Morgan Stanley estimates that AI-related global debt issuance had already reached nearly $236 billion by May 31, 2026—about four times the level of a year earlier—and it now expects the total to climb to almost $570 billion for the full year. The bank’s logic is straightforward: AI is no longer just a software story. It is a construction story, a power story, and above all a financing story. Morgan Stanley says Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta alone are expected to spend about $700 billion in 2026, with hyperscaler capital expenditure projected to surpass $1 trillion in 2027. (marketscreener.com)
Oracle offers a vivid example of this new economics. On June 10, 2026, the company said it had raised $43 billion in debt financing and $5 billion in equity financing in fiscal 2026 to support its cloud and AI infrastructure buildout, even as free cash flow for the year was negative $23.7 billion. At the same time, Oracle reported $638 billion in remaining performance obligations, and said that large AI customers had prepaid for, or directly supplied, $75 billion worth of GPUs, reducing some of Oracle’s own capital burden. Earlier, Oracle had announced a plan to raise $45 billion to $50 billion during calendar 2026 to expand capacity for customers including Meta, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, and TikTok. (oracle.com)
The broader buildout is enormous. OpenAI’s Stargate project, announced in January 2025, aims to invest $500 billion over four years in U.S. AI infrastructure, and OpenAI said in April 2026 that it had already secured more than 10 gigawatts of capacity, with over 3 gigawatts added in just 90 days. Yet a New York Fed staff report suggests that some of the risk sits in structures investors may not easily see: forward lease commitments reached roughly $500 billion by late 2025, and many projects are financed through special-purpose vehicles that may rely on debt for around 80% of their capital structure. That means the AI boom is being powered not only by innovation, but also by leverage—and if demand ever disappoints, the pressure could spread well beyond Silicon Valley. (openai.com)










