How the bond market is handling AI risks
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This
is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey.
And I'm Waylon Wong. If you own stocks in the U.S., it's very likely that your money is tied up with megatech companies. That's because the 10 biggest stocks in the S&P 500 are names like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Amazon.
And when these stocks dip, like they did this week on worries about AI spending, they take the market with them.
These same companies are starting to reshape the bond market. Tech giants are borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to finance AI data centers. If your 401k has money invested in a U.S. bond fund, your savings could be fueling the buildout. A buildout, by the way, that is a dominant force in the economy right now and affecting all of us.
This boom in data centers could lead to both productivity and financial gains, but it also exposes new risks and it all comes back to bonds. Today, we look at how the bond markets are digesting this glut of AI-related bonds, and we pose two questions that help us assess whether all of this borrowing is sustainable.
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Data centers are all over the news these days. They are flashpoints in local debates about what should be built in communities.
Now, if you're one of those people who don't want a data center in their backyard, and that's the majority of Americans, you might want this bond-fueled build-out stopped in its tracks.
Then, of course, if you're rooting for the stock market to keep going up, you need those data centers to power the hopes and dreams and profits of the tech giants. But enough about stocks. I want to talk about bonds. Again? Why? I always want to talk about bonds. Because the bond market is like this thing that people never think about. And yet, bonds have financed so much of human history. Wars, bridges, everything in between.
That's it? Just wars and bridges?
Yeah, just two things, wars and bridges. But so many bridges, so many beautiful bridges, Ricky. Airports?
Airports are good, too, but they're not as volatile. They don't go upy-dowdy as much as stocks. But all right, I'll let you have it.
And right now, bonds are funding data centers.
Bonds are interesting. I mean, that's what we're always saying to various kinds of receptivity.
This is fellow bond geek Zachary Griffiths. He works at an independent research firm called Credit Sites. His specialty is U.S. investment-grade debt. That refers to safe and highly rated bonds. U.S. treasuries are investment-grade, and so are bonds from mega tech companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft.
These companies, along with Oracle, are considered the main hyperscalers. This is a term we didn't really use that much until a few years ago, and now it's getting thrown around all the time.
Yeah, it's come about because it refers to corporations that run huge data centers. These hulking structures take a lot of money to build, and the hyperscalers have a lot of cash. Still, it's not enough for the kind of massive infrastructure projects they're planning. So they're getting ahead of their future spending needs by borrowing money now.
And they're not just wading gently into the bond market.
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