Amazon raises $25 billion as AI debt issuance keeps climbing

Published: 2026-07-08T07:11:14.000Z

Amazon has gone back to the bond market for at least 25 billion dollars, the latest sign of just how much borrowed money is now flowing into the artificial intelligence buildout. The company filed plans for an eight-part offering of floating and fixed-rate notes, with maturities stretching from three to 40 years, and told its underwriters it does not intend to issue any more debt this year. The proceeds are earmarked for general corporate purposes, which in Amazon's case is a polite way of describing the data centers, chips and supporting hardware that its AWS cloud arm is racing to install. The scale of the ambition behind the raise is enormous. Amazon has set its capital expenditure budget for 2026 at around 200 billion dollars, a steep jump from the 131 billion it spent in 2025, with the bulk of that going towards AI infrastructure. Chief executive Andy Jassy has repeatedly framed the spending spree as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, pushing back at investors nervous about the sheer size of the bet. This bond sale alone pushes Amazon's borrowing over the past year past the 100 billion dollar mark, following roughly 54 billion raised in the US and Europe earlier this year, a further 10 billion in Canada in June and an oversubscribed 37 billion dollar deal back in March. What makes this particular sale interesting is a subtle change in mood. Where the March offering was swamped with orders at more than twice the deal size, this one peaked at around 62 billion dollars of demand before settling closer to 41 billion, roughly 1.6 times the amount on offer. That is still comfortable coverage for a borrower rated among the safest around, but the cooler reception hints at the question hanging over the whole sector, namely how long investors will keep funding vast outlays before the returns become visible. Amazon is far from alone here, with Alphabet, Meta and Oracle all tapping debt and equity markets as big technology firms head towards a combined 700 billion dollars of AI spending this year. The Gulf sits close to the center of Amazon's regional plans, which gives this borrowing a Middle Eastern dimension. AWS already runs cloud regions in Bahrain and the UAE and has committed billions to a major AI zone in Saudi Arabia developed alongside the state-backed champion HUMAIN, drawn by cheap energy and governments eager to build sovereign compute. That expansion has not been without risk, after drone strikes earlier this year on cloud facilities in the UAE and Bahrain turned data center resilience into a security question. As Amazon competes with Microsoft, Oracle and G42 for the same regional accounts, the money it is now raising will help decide who anchors the Middle East's fast-growing AI infrastructure.