AI is quietly becoming a debt story: Morgan Stanley sees issuance near $570B in 2026
AI-related global debt issuance is on track to nearly double this year to about $570 billion, per Morgan Stanley, as data-center costs outrun what even the biggest tech balance sheets can cover in cash. The bank pegs the broader build-out's outside-financing needs at roughly $1.5 trillion through 2028. The shift is already visible in deals like Anthropic's $35 billion package, led by Apollo and Blackstone, which uses a special-purpose vehicle to buy Google TPUs and lease them back to the lab — bonds and private credit, not equity, increasingly bankrolling the boom.
Why it matters: Most people still picture the AI boom as a venture-capital phenomenon, but the more consequential shift is that it's becoming a leveraged-infrastructure phenomenon, financed with debt secured against chips and compute contracts. That changes the risk profile in a way worth taking seriously: equity can absorb a bad quarter, but debt demands payments on a schedule regardless of whether the AI demand curve keeps bending up. The Anthropic SPV structure — buy the chips, lease them back — is the detail that reveals how the machine actually works, and it rhymes uncomfortably with how earlier infrastructure and telecom build-outs were financed right before their busts. The second-order effect is that AI's fortunes are now wired into credit markets: a slowdown wouldn't just deflate valuations, it would stress the bonds and private-credit vehicles underwriting the data centers. My take is that this is the underappreciated systemic risk of the current cycle — the industry is taking on infrastructure-scale leverage while still carrying tech-scale uncertainty about demand, and those two things do not comfortably coexist forever.