How AI-Related Funding Will Reshape Credit Markets | January 30, 2026 | Torsten Slok's 'The Daily Spark'

"Training and running frontier AI models requires capital on a scale rarely seen in the private sector. Hyperscaler capex has already tripled since 2023, and forecasts now point to more than $2.7 trillion of cumulative AI-related spending from 2025 to 2029.

What began as a largely self-funded capex cycle is quickly becoming a financing event. In the final three months of 2025 alone, Oracle, Meta, Google and Amazon issued roughly $90 billion in bonds. As AI investment increasingly turns to debt markets, we expect this shift to meaningfully reorder the top ranks of the investment grade credit universe.

As the chart below illustrates, financing just 20% of AI capex through IG markets would materially reshape index composition — propelling Amazon into the top 3 issuers and pushing Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Google into the top 10, with Google jumping from 67th to 8th.

This is one of the core themes explored in our 2026 Credit Outlook. In addition, we also highlight several forces reshaping credit markets:

• Credit has shifted back into a buyer’s market. Economic growth in the US is expected to support corporate and consumer fundamentals in 2026. But the technical backdrop has flipped. After years of scarcity, credit markets are entering a higher supply regime driven by AI-related hyperscaler issuance and a reacceleration in M&A.