Rows of dark server racks in a vast data center, glowing blue and amber status lights receding into the distance, cables snaking along the floor, no people, no text, no logos.

EconomyReuters · ReutersSep 24, 2026

SoftBank issued $11 billion more in bonds for OpenAI as the AI buildout's financing grew more exotic

SoftBank Group issued more than $11 billion in new bonds this week specifically to finance its investment in OpenAI, extending a pattern of heavy debt-financed bets on AI infrastructure that researchers are increasingly flagging as a source of systemic financial risk. The financing wave went well beyond one company: Akamai signed an $11.6 billion cloud computing deal with Anthropic that included a warrant for up to a 5% equity stake, BlackRock and IFM Investors moved close to a $25 billion data-center deal, and Oracle triggered a 'force majeure' clause on a data-center project after power-supply delays disrupted its buildout plans, sending ripples through AI financing markets. Taken together, the week's deals illustrated how far the AI industry's capital structure has shifted from equity investment toward debt, leases, equity warrants, and infrastructure partnerships of a scale and complexity that a growing number of economists warn could concentrate risk across banks, private credit funds, and utilities if the AI spending cycle turns.

Analogies

Portrait of Walter Bagehot

The Fall of Overend, Gurney & Co.

Yet in six years they lost all their own wealth, sold the business to the company, and then lost a large part of the company's capital. And these losses were made in a manner so reckless and so foolish, that one would think a child who had lent money in the City of London would have lent it better.

Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873) →

1873 illustration of a crowd running on the Fourth National Bank in New York during the Panic of 1873

The Panic of 1873

In the midst of great national prosperity a financial crisis has occurred that has brought low fortunes of gigantic proportions.

Ulysses S. Grant, Fifth Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1873 →

Portrait photograph of Mark Twain, 1907

The Gilded Age

I saw through the pretty scheme in a second. It's a vast iron speculation!—millions upon millions in it!

Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) →

Portrait photograph of Anthony Trollope

The Way We Live Now

Gentlemen who don't know the nature of credit, how strong it is,—as the air,—to buoy you up; how slight it is,—as a mere vapour,—when roughly touched, can do an amount of mischief of which they themselves don't in the least understand the extent!

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875) →

J.M.W. Turner's 1844 painting Rain, Steam and Speed, showing a train crossing a bridge

Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway

A locomotive races across Brunel's Maidenhead Bridge into a dissolving world of rain and steam — Turner's tribute to, and warning about, the era's headlong infrastructure-building fever.

J.M.W. Turner, painting, 1844 (National Gallery, London) →

James Gillray's 1797 satirical etching "Midas, Transmuting All into Paper"

Midas, Transmuting All into Paper

Gillray's satire on the 1797 Bank Restriction Act shows Prime Minister Pitt as a reverse Midas, his body a sack of coin, vomiting banknotes onto a suddenly paper-based credit system.

James Gillray, etching, 1797 →