Central bankers now fear the AI gold rush could seed the next major financial shock.
Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-06-28
The Bank for International Settlements has warned that leveraged AI infrastructure financing—including over $100B in hyperscaler bond issuance, circular funding between chip and cloud companies, and quadrupled private credit exposure—could trigger a broad financial shock if AI revenue growth disappoints.
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Extraction
Topics: ai-economicsfinancial-riskai-infrastructureprivate-creditsystemic-risk
Claims
- BIS issued a warning that debt-financed AI infrastructure spending could seed the next major financial shock if AI demand disappoints.
- Hyperscaler bond issuance topped $100B in 2025, with data-center obligations increasingly shifted to private credit funds and insurers.
- Private credit funds have quadrupled their AI and IT exposure over five years to approximately 15% of portfolios.
- Circular financing—where chipmakers, hyperscalers, labs, and compute providers fund each other while booking mutual sales—makes real AI demand difficult to assess.
- A capex slowdown could cascade from suppliers to credit markets to households, where equity exposure is higher than in prior cycles.
Key quotes
The danger is not AI itself; the danger is building a leveraged supply chain around revenue that has not yet proved durable.
Circular financing adds another weak point because chipmakers, hyperscalers, AI labs, and compute providers can fund each other while also booking future sales from each other, which can make real demand harder to read.
AI can still deliver real productivity gains, but the financing stack now assumes that delivery arrives fast enough to support huge fixed costs.