Amazon plans to borrow up to $42 billion in one of the biggest corporate bond sales ever

Amazon is reportedly planning one of the largest corporate bond sales, targeting between $37 billion and $42 billion. The company’s planned sale of bonds is spread across 11 different tranches, which means 11 groups of bonds with different maturity dates ranging from 2 years to 50 years. The longest bond in the offering won't mature until 2076, as per a report by Bloomberg. The deal is being managed by four of Wall Street's biggest banks: HSBC, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, the report added.In simple terms, Amazon is borrowing a very large sum of money from investors by issuing bonds — essentially IOUs that pay interest over time and return the original sum at the end of the agreed period. Several companies do this instead of spending their own cash reserves when they want to make major long-term investments, take advantage of manageable interest rates, or simply preserve flexibility. The last time Amazon tapped the bond market was in November 2024, when it raised around $15 billion — its first US bond sale in three years. This new deal would dwarf that figure many times over.Amazon, like its Big Tech rivals, is in the middle of a historic spending spree on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure: data centres, chips, servers fibre networks and energy systems that are needed to power the next generation of AI products and cloud computing services. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's highly profitable cloud division, sits at the centre of that effort.Google’s parent company Alphabet raised around $32 billion in US and European bond markets in February, including a rare 100-year bond, a first for a tech firm since IBM in 1996. Oracle said last month it expects to raise between $45 billion and $50 billion in 2026 through a combination of debt and stock sales to expand its cloud infrastructure capacity.A report by news agency Reuters claimed that the demand for high-grade corporate bonds from big tech companies has remained strong. Meanwhile, analysts have said that the strong credit profiles of companies like Amazon and their central role in the AI buildout have made their debt attractive to investors looking for relatively safe returns.