According to Goldman Sachs, AI-related debt issuance reached $489 billion by mid-2026, with hyperscalers, meaning companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, accounting for roughly 40% of that total.

Over the past five years, these firms collectively added approximately $350 billion in debt specifically for AI data center expansion. In 2025 alone, corporate bond issuance tied to AI infrastructure hit around $120 billion, which represents growth of over 500% compared to 2024.

Meta issued roughly $30 billion in bonds earmarked for data centers. Alphabet and Oracle together issued nearly $60 billion in February 2026 alone.

Bond investors are starting to price in the possibility that AI capital expenditure cycles are longer and riskier than the original pitch suggested. Oracle’s credit default swap spreads increased 44%, reaching 87 basis points within a month of its heavy borrowing activity.

Investors are also selling longer-dated AI-linked bonds. When you’re unsure about a company’s cash flow picture five or ten years out, you don’t want to hold its 30-year paper.

Several companies, Oracle and Amazon most visibly, are showing rising leverage indicators alongside negative free cash flow projections.

For equity investors, when a company’s debt load grows and its free cash flow turns negative, the market starts discounting future earnings more aggressively. That puts pressure on valuations, particularly for mega-cap tech names that have historically traded at premium multiples precisely because of their perceived financial strength.

If investors keep demanding higher yields on AI-linked debt, that raises the cost of capital across the sector. Higher financing costs compress margins, slow down the pace of infrastructure buildout, and potentially delay the timeline on which these companies can convert AI investment into AI revenue.

For the crypto market, AI-adjacent crypto assets, including tokens tied to decentralized compute, AI inference infrastructure, and related sectors, have attracted investment partly on the premise that AI demand is structurally unstoppable. If traditional finance sentiment around AI sustainability starts to crack, that narrative pressure could spill into crypto assets that have been riding the same thematic wave.