AI’s Debt Surge: Wall Street Finances Tech Giants’ CapEx

The significance here is structural: AI compute is being converted from a corporate balance-sheet expense into a financed asset class, with private credit and asset managers taking on the role banks once played for capex-heavy industries. That broadens who carries the risk beyond the tech giants themselves, and it makes capital efficiency, not just model capability, the metric that matters. The open question is whether free cash flow keeps pace with the borrowing, and whether lenders keep pricing that risk as benignly as they do now.