AI 融资 “轰炸” 债市！亚马逊 (AMZN.US) 250 亿美元发债引发科技债抛售

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Amazon's (AMZN.US) bond issuance of up to $25 billion has impacted the bond market for large U.S. technology companies. As investors sell existing bonds to free up funds for participation in the new bond subscription, bonds from "super-scale cloud service providers" represented by Amazon, Alphabet (GOOGL.US), Nvidia (NVDA.US), Meta (META.US), Oracle (ORCL.US), and SpaceX generally weakened on Tuesday. The market is beginning to worry that the continued expansion of AI infrastructure investment will bring more financing pressure.

Amazon's issuance of $25 billion in bonds is divided into eight maturities and is another large bond transaction following the company's completion of $37 billion in financing in March this year. Data shows that the highest subscription demand for this issuance was about $62 billion, which is only about half of the subscription scale during the March financing, indicating that investor enthusiasm for the continued financing of tech giants has cooled.

Affected by the new bond issuance, the technology sector became one of the weakest-performing sectors in the U.S. investment-grade bond secondary market that day. According to Trace data, the spread of Amazon's bonds maturing in 2046 with a coupon rate of 5.65% widened by about 21 basis points to 97 basis points; the spread of Alphabet's bonds maturing in 2066 with a coupon rate of 5.75% widened by about 12 basis points to 98 basis points. Additionally, the Canadian dollar bonds issued by Amazon and Alphabet also weakened that day.

John Lloyd, global head of diversified credit at Janus Henderson Investors, stated that investors selling bonds from super-scale cloud service providers is essentially similar to "selling one house to buy another," with the aim of freeing up funds to participate in new bond issuances. However, unlike real estate, the supply of such technology company bonds in the market is currently quite ample, and most investment portfolios are already relatively saturated.

Lloyd believes that the fundamentals of large technology companies remain robust, and the weakness in bonds does not indicate a deterioration in credit conditions. However, as the construction of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure continues to advance, the market is increasingly concerned about whether tech giants will need to continue expanding their debt levels in the coming years to support funding for data centers and computing power construction. Given that future bond supply will continue to increase, Janus Henderson currently maintains an underweight position on the technology sector and super-scale cloud service providers.

He stated that when bond supply continues to increase, issuers must offer higher yields to investors in exchange for the market continuing to provide balance sheet capacity.

Andrzej Skiba, head of U.S. fixed income at BlueBay under RBC Global Asset Management, expects that Amazon's new bond issuance will have an issuance premium of about 10 to 15 basis points compared to existing bonds. He also maintains an underweight view on the technology sector, believing that future capital expenditures by technology companies may continue to exceed market expectations, thereby driving more bond financing.

Skiba stated that unless the market sees more technology companies supporting capital expenditures through large-scale equity financing, bond credit spreads may continue to face pressure. In contrast, he is more optimistic about financing bonds for certain data center projects, as these assets can provide investors with higher credit spread compensation