Fortune reports that the AI build-out is increasingly financed by debt — and that investor demand for it is plunging just as hyperscalers ramp up bond issuance. Bloomberg has separately reported that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle collectively added roughly $350 billion in debt obligations over the last five years, doubling their combined load during the AI spending spree. Bloomberg also published a piece on July 19 arguing AI could contribute to a fiscal crisis, tying the private borrowing story to strained government balance sheets. None of this says the boom is over, but it changes the failure mode: earlier AI cycles were funded by equity, where a bad bet dilutes shareholders. Debt-funded capacity has to be serviced whether or not it gets used.