A borrowing boom for chips
The capital spending behind AI data centres is increasingly funded with debt. Credit strategist Amanda Lynam estimates AI-related bond sales at $489 billion so far in 2026, already more than the whole of 2025. A Morgan Stanley estimate from 2025 put the eventual AI funding gap at $1.5 trillion, and a small group of private-credit lenders keeps appearing in these deals.
The largest packages are tied to custom chips. Broadcom has been working to arrange more than $50 billion of financing for the AI accelerator it is developing with OpenAI, a programme referred to internally as Nexus and aimed at multiple gigawatts of capacity through 2029. Apollo and Blackstone are in early talks on the structure. SpaceX has approached lenders about roughly $40 billion, split between bank loans and investment-grade bonds, to acquire Nvidia processors, with closing expected in 2027.
Spreads widen, shares diverge
Credit default swaps, which price the cost of insuring against default, tell the story. Broadcom's five-year spread has more than tripled from about 41 basis points to roughly 136, and Oracle's has hit a record near 261. Its shares have fallen more than 40% since June 2, while Broadcom's are down about 25%. Nvidia's five-year spread sits in an 82 to 87 basis point range, well below both, and its shares have held up, closing at $237.47.
The custom silicon race
Custom accelerators are the strategic bet behind the borrowing. Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan has said OpenAI's chip cuts inference cost per token by about 50% versus current GPU setups, though OpenAI has not published independently verified production benchmarks. Custom ASIC designs are projected to take a larger share of AI compute from merchant GPUs through 2026 and beyond.
Analysts warn that long-term debt competes with government bonds for the same buyers, and that if AI spending slows, the same handful of lenders would absorb the losses. Chip-making supply chains, including vacuum and thin-film process equipment, would feel that slowdown first.
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