Junk-Rated Debt Reaches $37 Billion in U.S. Data Center Bonds So Far

U.S. data center developers and AI cloud providers issued $37 billion in bonds rated below BBB so far in 2026, nearly half of the $80 billion raised in a mid-October snapshot.

Those bonds financed 16 projects leased to or backed by Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Oracle, Jane Street, CoreWeave and Fluidstack. The group includes data center developers and AI cloud providers known as neoclouds. Long-term lease commitments from investment-grade hyperscalers have helped developers secure financing for new sites, linking the bond market to large technology companies’ demand for capacity.

The lower-rated component has already grown well beyond its level for all of last year. Data center bonds totaled $36 billion in 2025, including $8.6 billion rated below BBB. The $37 billion recorded so far this year is more than four times that full-year junk-rated amount. The $80 billion total is also year to date, so it represents a partial-year snapshot rather than a completed annual total.

Here, “junk-rated” means rated below BBB. The $37 billion counts bonds in that rating category, while the $80 billion counts all data center bond issuance in the snapshot.

Average yield on the broader junk-rated group rose to nearly 10% over the week before Oct. 16. That figure is an average across the group, not a yield for one company’s bonds. Columbia Business School economist Stijn van Nieuwerburgh described the focus on risk: “They only worry about the downside.”

The yield level puts financing costs in focus for developers and cloud operators that still need capital to build capacity. The economics of those projects depend on continued demand for AI computing over several years. The mid-October figures do not identify a separate yield for each company tied to the projects.

A separate year-to-date project-finance total of $106 billion covers U.S.-dollar bonds, much of the financing tied to data centers and other AI investments. It includes both investment-grade and high-yield debt, while the $80 billion figure covers data center bond issuance. The totals therefore cover different pools of financing.