Analysts expect more debt to be raised by the Big Five hyperscale companies this year as they race to build their data center infrastructure, following last week’s near-record bond sale of Amazon’s roughly $54 billion of investment-grade bonds.

Hyperscalers, which operate massive data centers and other infrastructure to facilitate AI training and deployment, are raising debt to finance the data centers needed to fuel the boom in AI.

“There is a lot of capital raising expected in this sector,” said John Cervida, co-head of investment-grade debt capital markets at JPMorgan, which led the Amazon deal.

“Whether it’s the companies’ publicly stated capex budgets, or whether it’s the various banks’ estimates of the amount of hyperscalar issuance, if you look at all of them, the real expectation is that there will be more at some point,” Servidea added.

Analysts at BofA Global Research on Friday raised their forecast for hyperscalers’ new debt in 2026 to $175 billion from $140 billion. In early February, analysts at Barclays said US investment-grade corporate bond issuance could exceed $2 trillion in 2026, which they said would “even exceed the post-Covid record levels seen in 2020.”

The five major AI hyperscalers – Amazon, Alphabet’s Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle – issued $121 billion in US corporate bonds last year, against an average of $28 billion per year between 2020 and 2024, according to a January report from BofA Securities. Microsoft and Oracle declined to comment, while the other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

According to a December report from MUFG analysts, four of the five largest US high-grade bond deals in 2025 were made by hyperscalers. Most of them happened in the second half of the year.

Oracle sold $18 billion of bonds in September. This was followed by Meta’s $30 billion deal in October and Alphabet ($17.5 billion) and Amazon ($15 billion) deals in November.

Alphabet raised $31.51 billion in global bonds in February this year, including a rare 100-year “century” bond as part of the deal.

Recently, Amazon raised about $37 billion in 11 tranches in the US bond market on March 10. The company raised 14.5 billion euro-denominated ($16.8 billion) bonds the following day.

The overwhelming demand for Amazon’s bond sale — nearly four times the total amount sold — underscores investors’ appetite for the big hyperscalers’ debt.

Market participants believe that despite quiet days in primary markets before and after the February 28 escalation of conflict between Iran and US-Israeli forces, actual and expected debt increases by hyperscalers will keep forecasts of a potential record-breaking aggregate US corporate debt issuance on track.

“It’s fertile ground in the capital markets right now, and you’re in the first half of the year,” said George Catrambone, head of Americas fixed income at asset manager DWS.