Tech Giants to Outpace US in Issuing Long-Term Debt, Sunak Says

Technology companies are on track to become larger net issuers of long-term debt than the US government in 2027, former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said, describing the scale of capital demand driven by artificial intelligence investment.

The observation points to a significant reordering of capital markets, where private-sector technology investment is absorbing a share of long-duration financing that has historically been dominated by sovereign borrowers, adding upward pressure on yields at a moment when European governments are already fiscally stretched.

“The demand for capital from the technology companies is so huge that, remarkably, if you think about long-term debt, so 10-year-plus debt next year, I think the technology companies are going to be bigger net issuers of that debt than the US government is,” Sunak said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi.

Sunak argued that the AI-driven capital build out is converging with a separate structural pressure: governments across Europe and elsewhere are proving unable to maintain fiscal discipline, a dynamic he linked to the rise of populist politics. Together, he said, these forces are compounding fiscal challenges for European governments.

This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.