Amazon leads record US corporate borrowing rush with $40bn bond sales

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Amazon kicked off what is set to be the busiest day on record for the US corporate bond sales with plans to raise more than $40bn as borrowers rushed to take advantage of calmer markets after US President Donald Trump hinted that the Iran war could end soon.

The ecommerce giant is marketing 11 tranches of dollar debt to investors on Tuesday to raise up to $30bn, according to people familiar with the transaction, as it steps up a borrowing drive to finance its vast AI investments.

Amazon is targeting a further €10bn from an inaugural euro-denominated bond sale which is scheduled to launch as early as Wednesday, the people said.

Nearly a dozen blue-chip companies, including Honeywell Aerospace and the financial services arms of Toyota and Ford Motor, hurried to raise debt on Tuesday, reviving a market that had slowed considerably since conflict in the Middle East erupted more than a week ago.

Investment grade issuance is expected to total around $60bn, surpassing the previous one-day record of $52bn in 2013 when Verizon sold $49bn in bonds.

“The windows are getting smaller to get these deals done,” said Mark Clegg, a senior fixed-income trader at Allspring Global Investments. “Whenever there’s stability, capital markets folks really have to jump in. The market went from planning things week by week to hour by hour.”

Amazon’s bond sales mark the latest intensification of a borrowing binge by Big Tech companies to fund AI infrastructure.

The Seattle-based group raised $15bn in November as part of its first US bond sale in three years. Rivals Oracle raised $25bn last month, while Alphabet picked up more than $30bn in an issuance spanning dollar, sterling and Swiss franc denominated debt.

Tuesday’s sale comes as Amazon faces pressure from investors worried about outsized spending by tech groups on AI infrastructure, particularly to service unprofitable start-ups such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

The company spooked the market in February when it outlined plans for $200bn of capital expenditure this year, ahead of rivals including Google and Microsoft. The bulk of spending will be allocated to AI and the build-out of data centre infrastructure.

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said last month the company was confident in its forecast of demand for computing power from its data centres and planned to increase spending on its custom AI chips, robotics and low Earth orbit satellites.

“We’re going to invest aggressively here . . . We’re going to invest to be the leader in this space,” Jassy told investors on a company earnings call.

Shares in the cloud giant are down more than 5 per cent since the beginning of the year, though it has fared better than rivals Oracle and Microsoft.

The longest maturity dollar debt on sale, a 50-year bond, was expected to yield 1.55 percentage points over US Treasuries during initial price discussions, people familiar with the transaction said.

The deal had attracted over $86bn in orders just before noon, according to the people.

Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and JPMorgan are the bookrunners on Tuesday’s dollar debt sale. JPMorgan is also the global co-ordinator in the euro market, alongside Bank of America, Barclays and Société Générale.