The International Monetary Fund warned that corporate borrowing to fund AI buildouts in early 2026 could present a greater systemic risk than a valuation bubble, noting AI hyperscalers issued $159 billion in corporate bonds in the first five months of 2026.
The borrowing binge is concentrated among major cloud and AI providers, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, and extends to chipmaker Nvidia, which issued $25 billion in bonds last month, while Alphabet separately announced an $85 billion equity raise, figures tracked by Dealogic and company disclosures show.
"What is quite worrisome from a financial stability perspective is that the major tech firms are starting to leverage up themselves," Tobias Adrian, director of the IMF's Monetary and Capital Markets Department, told Bloomberg.
That risk is exacerbated by signs the physical buildout may lag financing, a J.P. Morgan analysis from May found 60% of data-centre capacity planned for completion by 2027 has not reached construction and another 7% is delayed, and the IMF has additionally flagged frontier-model risks after Anthropic's Mythos disclosure, making progress toward the 2027 completion target the next material data point.
