The Google parent raised $20 billion in its biggest ever US dollar bond sale on Monday—more than the $15 billion initially expected, after racking up one of the biggest order books of all time. It’s also planning debut deals in Switzerland and the UK, including a rare sale of 100-year bonds—marking the first time a tech company has tried such an offering since the dotcom frenzy of the late 1990s.

The big borrowing spree comes just days after technology companies from Meta Platforms Inc. to Amazon.com Inc. said they were ramping up spending to meet their ambitious AI plans. Their plans fanned fears that the AI arms race, and the billions of dollars of debt needed to help fund it, would weigh on credit markets.

Investors appeared to push those concerns to the side on Monday, as the Alphabet bond sale drew more than $100 billion of orders.

“Clearly we’re not in a typical capex cycle, and after previously being net savers, the companies involved are now going deep into the well for financing to secure the resources to compete,” said Andrew Dassori, chief investment officer at Wavelength Capital Management LLC. “This is a major transition, and a critical one when thinking about potential risk and return for corporate bonds in the US.”

Alphabet last week said it’s planning for as much as $185 billion of capex this year, more than it has spent in the past three years combined, as it invests heavily in the data centres critical to its AI ambitions. The company said the investments are already boosting revenue, as AI encourages more online searching.

As other companies known as hyperscalers boost spending too, capex for the four biggest US tech companies are forecast to reach about $650 billion in 2026, driving a financing boom and a potentially disruptive technology that could completely reshape the global economy.

A chunk of that spending is being funded in the bond market. Just last week, Oracle Corp. raised $25 billion from a bond that attracted a record $129 billion of orders at its peak.

Alphabet’s US dollar bond sale on Monday came in seven parts, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The yield on the longest portion of the offering—a bond maturing in 2066—was 0.95 percentage point more than Treasuries, a tighter risk premium than the roughly 1.2 percentage point discussed earlier.

Morgan Stanley expects hyperscalers to borrow $400 billion this year, up from $165 billion in 2025. The offering spree will likely drive high-grade debt issuance to a record $2.25 trillion this year, Vishwas Patkar, head of US credit strategy at the bank, wrote in a note on Monday. Some credit strategists—including Patkar and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Nathaniel Rosenbaum—expect the massive issuance to push corporate bond spreads wider.

“We think that the playbook is similar to 1997/98 or 2005; credit underperforms, but not ‘end of cycle,’” Patkar wrote, referring to a period when defaults rise and credit availability tightens.

Alphabet didn’t respond to a comment request. JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp., which are helping manage the US dollar bond sale, declined to comment. Deutsche Bank AG, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo & Co. also managed the deal.

Alphabet last tapped the US bond market in November, when it raised $17.5 billion in a deal that attracted about $90 billion of orders. As part of that transaction, it sold a 50-year note—the longest corporate tech bond offering in US dollars last year, according to Bloomberg-compiled data—which has tightened in secondary markets. The company also sold €6.5 billion of notes in Europe at the time.

Capital spending in artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure and data centres is expected to reach $3 trillion in aggregate by 2029, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence estimate.