S&P Global has said rapid, large-scale AI spending and increasingly complex financing structures are weakening the credit quality of major cloud operators and their counterparties.
The rating agency warned that shift could spread through linked borrowers and local infrastructure providers, rather than remaining contained to the companies making the initial investments.
What is driving the concern
S&P flagged rising capital expenditure, opaque deal structures and layered support arrangements as the main sources of risk.
These include situations where hyperscalers underwrite leases or backstop loans for other companies, even as those same hyperscalers continue tapping bond markets themselves.
Amazon alone has raised around $100 billion this year through debt markets.
"The credit quality of hyperscalers is gradually weakening," S&P analysts wrote, a concise signal that top-tier credit ratings are coming under pressure as returns on AI investment may take years to materialise.
A web of interconnected balance sheets
S&P noted that the issue is amplified by hyperscalers lending their reputations to smaller companies, including neoclouds, data centre developers and start-ups such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
That dynamic is creating what amounts to a partial shadow-lending market, tying together corporate, municipal and utility balance sheets in ways that are not always visible from the outside.
Wider market pressures add to the risk
Investors are also watching broader macroeconomic forces that complicate the picture, including rising government bond yields and higher refinancing costs more generally, themes highlighted in recent commentary about surging global bond yields.
S&P warned that a stumble by a lesser-known counterparty, rather than one of the major hyperscalers themselves, could ripple back and affect even the best-capitalised firms in the sector.
That interconnectedness is precisely what makes the current wave of AI financing difficult to assess from any single company's balance sheet alone, since the real exposure may lie in relationships that are not fully disclosed in any one set of accounts.
