Amazon Sells $5.8 Billion Sterling Bond, Uber Debuts in Euros as US Tech Debt Binge Tops $200 Billion for the Year

Since the European Central Bank flagged on August 31 that hyperscaler borrowing could crowd out other issuers in its bond markets, Amazon and Uber have both proceeded with fresh European debt sales this week.

Amazon raised £4.25 billion ($5.76 billion) in its first-ever sterling bond sale, according to a bank managing the deal cited by KSL News. That's more than initially expected. The company saw over £12 billion in demand for the four-part offering, split across 3-, 6-, 12- and 19-year tranches priced at spreads of 53 to 93 basis points over UK government bonds.

Uber made its own market debut the same week, seeking 4.5 billion euros ($5.2 billion) from a five-part euro bond covering maturities from three to 20 years, according to The Business Times. Investor bids topped 21 billion euros, tightening pricing from initial guidance. Fitch Ratings assigned the bond an A- score, citing the "broader geographic diversification and greater scale" Uber expects from its pending acquisition of Germany's Delivery Hero.

Both deals landed on what Bloomberg called a single day for US corporate borrowing in Europe, with six American companies tapping the market at once. US non-financial corporates are on pace to blow past the $150 billion annual record set in 2025 for debt raised in European currencies, based on Bloomberg-compiled data.

The Numbers Behind the Borrowing

Hyperscalers, the small handful of companies including Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft that run the cloud and AI infrastructure driving this spending, have issued more than $200 billion in debt so far in 2026. That's more than double all of 2025, according to LSEG data reported by KSL News.

The reason is straightforward: AI infrastructure is eating cash faster than these companies can generate it. Hyperscalers are projected to need more than $1 trillion in capital expenditure by 2028, roughly 3% of current annual US GDP, according to the European Central Bank's own blog post published August 31 and authored by market operations staffers Anne Duquerroy, Oana Furtuna, Imène Rahmouni-Rousseau and Lia Vaz Cruz.

That spending has forced a shift from internal cash funding to bond markets worldwide. Amazon alone has now tapped euros, Swiss francs, Canadian dollars and sterling this year. Alphabet got there first in the sterling market back in February, raising £5.5 billion including a rare 100-year bond, according to KSL News.

The ECB's Warning, and Its Caveat

The ECB's concern, laid out plainly in its blog post, is that hyperscaler debt could "push up borrowing costs for all sectors as they accumulate debt and account for a growing share of bond markets, with a potential spillover to the sovereign and supranational segment of the bond market." US tech giants already hold about €40 billion in euro zone bonds and account for nearly 10% of new gross issuance this year, per Channel NewsAsia's reporting on the same blog.

Investors have finite balance sheets. If pension funds and insurers keep loading up on hyperscaler debt because it's high-quality and long-dated, something else gets squeezed out. Modern Diplomacy's analysis notes the effect could extend to governments if investors start favoring hyperscaler paper over traditionally safer sovereign bonds.

But the ECB's own blog doesn't paint this as purely bad news. It says the bonds have "so far improved credit quality in the euro investment grade corporate market and increased activity at the longer end of the maturity spectrum." The ECB also flagged, separately, that credit rating agencies may be too optimistic, since ratings rest on assumptions about future revenue growth and leverage that "may not stand the test of time."

Cracks Already Showing

There's evidence investor appetite has limits. Amazon's last dollar-market outing in July, a $25 billion offering, drew weaker demand than the company's previous sales, according to LSEG data cited by KSL News. Hyperscalers are fanning out into sterling, euros, yen and Swiss francs instead of leaning solely on the US market.

Writing for the Epoch Times, Jeffrey Tucker argues bond markets are already signaling distress over sovereign debt loads more broadly, pointing to interest outlays on US federal debt crossing $1 trillion annually and warning that, under current trajectories, debt service could consume all federal revenue by 2052. That's a separate problem from corporate hyperscaler debt, but it underscores the same basic mechanism Tucker and the ECB are both pointing at: when one category of borrower floods a bond market, everyone else pays more to borrow.

Europe's own AI buildout remains behind the US, with data center capacity growing 15% over the past year compared to 26% stateside, according to Morgan Stanley research cited by Modern Diplomacy. The open question now is whether European investors keep financing American tech giants at this pace, or whether the crowding-out effect the ECB flagged starts showing up in the borrowing costs of European companies that have nothing to do with AI at all.