The money funding America's AI buildout is increasingly coming from Europe.
Hyperscalers — the big cloud and AI companies behind the AI boom — have raised $48 billion in European-currency bonds so far this year, according to Apollo's Daily Spark note published this week. That is more than triple what they raised in all of 2025. The tally breaks down to €27 billion in euro-denominated bonds, £13 billion in sterling, and CHF 7.5 billion in Swiss francs.
The shift into European debt markets is dramatic. Hyperscalers went from a 0% share of Swiss franc bond sales last year to 22% this year, and from zero to 10% of sterling issuance. They now account for 3% of euro investment-grade issuance — compared with an 8% share of U.S. investment-grade corporate issuance. Amazon and Alphabet have been the largest corporate issuers in the euro bond market this year.
Why go to Europe? The AI buildout is an ocean of capital spending: credit analysts estimate big tech could spend up to $1 trillion on AI-related investments by 2028, forcing them to tap debt markets around the world. Europe adds depth, especially at longer maturities. Hyperscalers make up 7% of euro issuance with maturities of ten years or more, helping fill a part of the market that has historically been thin outside sovereign debt.
Apollo forecasts the wave will grow another 25% in 2027, making European credit markets an even bigger fixture of AI infrastructure funding.
Not everyone is comfortable with that. The European Central Bank has been sounding the alarm. A September ECB blog post warned that U.S. tech giants flooding the euro bond market could crowd out other borrowers, push up financing costs across all sectors — with potential spillover into sovereign and supranational debt — and raise credit risk. The authors questioned whether credit ratings on big tech debt might be too optimistic, resting on assumptions about future revenue growth and leverage that may not stand the test of time.
The Bank for International Settlements has flagged the same surge, warning that a sharp repricing of AI assets could collide with already-fragile sovereign bond markets and amplify a financial shock. ECB policymaker Olli Rehn recently suggested the AI debt glut is doing some of the central bank's tightening work for it.
The irony is hard to miss. The great American AI race — Nvidia's chips, OpenAI's and Anthropic's models, data centers rising across the U.S. — is being financed, in growing part, by European bond investors.
For now, markets are absorbing it all. Corporate spreads remain tight, and non-hyperscaler issuance is holding steady. But when $48 billion is described by the ECB as possibly merely the start of a financing wave of unprecedented proportions, it is worth watching who owns the debt when the cycle turns.