The full story
Which of the four would you lend to?
Each coin is one bond sale: the company borrowing money from investors, to pay back with interest.
How much they borrowed: • 2016–2024: about $143B in nine years, 0 to 3 sales a year. • 2025: about $83B. • 2026 so far: about $245B, in 12 sales.
This year, by company: • Amazon: about $99B. • Alphabet: about $82B, the latest in euros on 2 Nov. • Meta: $40B, the latest $15B on 3 Nov. • Microsoft: $25B on 29 Oct, its first bond sale since January 2017.
Reports tie the borrowing to the cost of AI data centers.
The catch: borrowing isn't trouble by itself. These four are some of the most trusted borrowers in the world, and they still hold big piles of cash. What changed is how much and how often.
How we counted: one coin per priced bond sale, amounts from the companies' SEC term sheets. Euro, pound and yen sales are converted at that day's rate, so totals are rounded. Sales in two currencies in the same week count once. Amazon's 2017 and Meta's 2022 sales were private and come from their later SEC filings and Bloomberg.
