THE FOUNDERS EXCLUSIVE
Amazon is set to raise £4.25 billion, or about $5.8 billion, in its first-ever sterling bond sale after attracting more than £12 billion of investor orders. The Founders’ analysis of Amazon’s regulatory filings and 2026 debt offerings shows a much larger shift behind the transaction: the company has now tapped global bond markets for roughly $97.7 billion equivalent this year as its unprecedented AI and cloud infrastructure programme transforms the financing model of one of the world’s largest technology companies.
Amazon is set to raise £4.25 billion ($5.76 billion) through its first bond offering denominated in British pounds, expanding its increasingly global borrowing programme as spending on artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure pushes the company deeper into international capital markets.
The four-part transaction attracted more than £12 billion of investor demand, according to a lead-manager memorandum reported by Reuters on September 9.
Amazon will raise £1.25 billion through three-year bonds and £1 billion each through six-, 12- and 19-year securities.
Final pricing is expected at spreads of 53 basis points, 75 basis points, 90 basis points and 93 basis points, respectively, above corresponding UK government bonds.
But the importance of the transaction extends considerably beyond Amazon borrowing in sterling for the first time.
The Founders’ analysis of Amazon’s SEC filings, bond transactions and latest financial results shows that the company is undergoing one of the most significant changes in its capital structure in years.
Amazon ended 2025 with $68.0 billion of unsecured senior notes outstanding.
By June 30, 2026, that figure had reached $132.1 billion.
That represents an increase of approximately $64.1 billion, or 94% in only six months.
And Amazon has continued borrowing since then.
Including its $25 billion U.S. bond issue in July and the new £4.25 billion sterling transaction, The Founders calculates that Amazon has tapped public bond markets for approximately $97.7 billion equivalent during 2026 alone.
The reason is increasingly visible in Amazon’s cash-flow statement.
The company expects capital spending to reach approximately $220 billion this year, driven primarily by the infrastructure required to expand Amazon Web Services and meet rapidly growing demand for artificial intelligence computing.
Amazon is therefore entering a new phase: a company capable of generating more than $160 billion of annual operating cash flow is simultaneously investing so aggressively that its free cash flow has turned negative — and global debt markets are becoming an increasingly important part of how that expansion is financed.
Inside Amazon’s £4.25 billion sterling debut
The final structure of Amazon’s first sterling bond transaction is:
| Tranche | Amount | Final spread over comparable UK government bonds |
|---|---|---|
| 3-year | £1.25 billion | 53 bps |
| 6-year | £1.00 billion | 75 bps |
| 12-year | £1.00 billion | 90 bps |
| 19-year | £1.00 billion | 93 bps |
| Total | £4.25 billion |
Investor orders exceeded £12 billion, meaning demand was at least 2.82 times the final £4.25 billion issue size.
That level of demand gave Amazon substantial leverage during pricing.
When the bonds were initially marketed, indicative spreads were approximately 70 basis points for the three-year notes, 90 basis points for six years, 105 basis points for 12 years and 110 basis points for 19 years.
Final pricing therefore tightened by:
| Maturity | Initial guidance | Final spread | Tightening |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 years | ~70 bps | 53 bps | ~17 bps |
| 6 years | ~90 bps | 75 bps | ~15 bps |
| 12 years | ~105 bps | 90 bps | ~15 bps |
| 19 years | ~110 bps | 93 bps | ~17 bps |
That compression is significant.
It means demand allowed Amazon to offer investors less additional yield relative to British government debt than it initially indicated would be necessary.
The weighted-average spread across the four tranches, using issuance size as the weighting, is approximately 76 basis points over corresponding gilts, according to The Founders’ calculations.
The result suggests that even after an extraordinary year of technology-company debt issuance, institutional investors remain willing to absorb large amounts of Amazon credit when pricing is attractive.
The Founders analysis: Amazon has raised roughly $97.7 billion of bonds in 2026
The sterling offering becomes more significant when placed beside the rest of Amazon’s borrowing this year.
Amazon’s June-quarter filing shows that the company had already completed four major groups of bond offerings before July.
Those included $37 billion of U.S. dollar notes in March, €14.5 billion of euro notes in March, CHF2.8 billion of Swiss-franc notes in May, and C$14 billion of Canadian-dollar notes in June.
Amazon’s filing valued those foreign-currency offerings at approximately $16.55 billion, $3.49 billion and $9.85 billion respectively as of June 30.
Adding the subsequent $25 billion U.S. offering completed in July and the approximately $5.76 billion sterling deal produces the following picture:
| 2026 Amazon bond transaction | Approx. USD equivalent used in analysis |
|---|---|
| March U.S. dollar notes | $37.00 billion |
| March euro notes | $16.55 billion |
| May Swiss-franc notes | $3.49 billion |
| June Canadian-dollar notes | $9.85 billion |
| July U.S. dollar notes | $25.00 billion |
| September sterling notes | $5.76 billion |
| Approximate 2026 total | $97.65 billion |
Methodology: The Founders calculation uses the carrying values reported by Amazon at June 30 for the euro, Swiss-franc and Canadian-dollar notes, the face value of the March dollar issuance, the $25 billion July transaction and the dollar conversion reported for the September sterling issue. Because exchange rates fluctuate, this figure should be treated as an approximate measure of issuance volume rather than Amazon’s accounting debt balance.
The scale is remarkable.
Amazon issued $15 billion of new notes during 2025, according to its annual report.
The approximately $97.7 billion of bond issuance identified by The Founders for 2026 is therefore more than six times the size of Amazon’s entire 2025 issuance, although the comparison does not account for currency movements or debt repayments.
This is not simply routine refinancing.
It reflects a fundamental change in the capital intensity of the technology industry.
Amazon’s outstanding senior notes nearly doubled in six months
The expansion is already clearly visible on Amazon’s balance sheet.
At December 31, 2025, Amazon reported:
$68.0 billion of unsecured senior notes outstanding.
At June 30, 2026:
$132.1 billion.
The increase was approximately:
$64.1 billion, or 94.3%.
That means Amazon almost doubled its unsecured senior-note balance in the first half of the year alone.
This does not mean Amazon is experiencing a liquidity problem.
The opposite distinction is important.
At June 30, Amazon held approximately $78.2 billion of cash and cash equivalents and another $44.8 billion of marketable securities. Combined cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were approximately $123 billion.
The borrowing is therefore occurring alongside enormous liquidity and operating cash generation.
The financing decision is better understood as capital allocation.
Amazon is choosing to fund part of a historically large infrastructure programme through long-term debt instead of requiring current operating cash flow to absorb the entire investment burden.
The $220 billion reason behind Amazon’s financing expansion
Amazon’s expected $220 billion of 2026 capital expenditure provides the clearest explanation for the borrowing.
The company increased its spending outlook following its second-quarter results as demand for AWS cloud and artificial-intelligence infrastructure continued to exceed available capacity.
Amazon’s SEC filing provides an even more detailed picture.
Cash capital expenditures reached $53.1 billion in the second quarter alone, compared with $31.4 billion during the same quarter of 2025.
That is an increase of approximately 69% year over year.
For the first six months of 2026, cash capital expenditures reached $96.3 billion, compared with $55.6 billion a year earlier — an increase of approximately 73%.
Amazon said the spending primarily reflected investments in technology infrastructure, with the majority supporting AWS growth, as well as additional fulfilment capacity.
Even Amazon’s enormous operating cash flow is struggling to keep pace with that investment.
Trailing 12-month operating cash flow increased 33% to $161.4 billion through June.
But purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds and incentives, reached approximately $169 billion.
As a result, Amazon reported trailing 12-month free cash flow of negative $7.6 billion, compared with positive $18.2 billion a year earlier.
Amazon explicitly said the increase in property and equipment purchases primarily reflected investments in artificial intelligence.
That is one of the most important numbers behind the sterling bond sale.
Amazon’s underlying businesses continue to generate immense amounts of cash.
But AI infrastructure is currently consuming capital even faster.
AWS is giving Amazon a reason to keep spending
There is also an important reason Amazon is willing to invest at this pace: AWS growth has accelerated sharply.
AWS generated $42.2 billion of revenue in the second quarter, an increase of 37% year over year and its fastest growth rate in 18 quarters.
AWS operating income reached $16.6 billion, up from approximately $10.2 billion a year earlier.
That represents growth of roughly 64%.
Its quarterly operating margin reached approximately 39.4%.
AWS therefore generated roughly 60% of Amazon’s total $27.5 billion quarterly operating income, despite accounting for only about one-fifth of consolidated revenue.
That economic profile matters enormously to the financing argument.
Amazon is not simply spending hundreds of billions of dollars to defend an existing business. It is expanding infrastructure behind one of its highest-margin operations while demand is accelerating.
The company also reported approximately $496 billion of contracted future service commitments with original terms exceeding one year as of June 30, primarily associated with AWS.
The weighted-average remaining life of those long-term contracts was 6.4 years.
Amazon’s filing disclosed two particularly large AI-related commitments.
During the first quarter, AWS and OpenAI expanded their commercial arrangement by $100 billion over eight years.
During the second quarter, AWS and Anthropic expanded their strategic collaboration by more than $100 billion over ten years.
Both agreements include obligations linked to AWS computing infrastructure and chips.
Those long-term commitments do not guarantee that every dollar becomes revenue immediately, but they provide strategic context for why Amazon is building capacity years ahead of present demand.
Why sterling — and why now?
Amazon’s move into pounds is part of a deliberate expansion across global fixed-income markets.
The company has already issued debt denominated in euros, Swiss francs and Canadian dollars this year. Sterling now joins that funding programme.
The logic is straightforward.
A company attempting to raise tens of billions of dollars every few months cannot depend indefinitely on a single pool of investors.
Selling bonds in multiple currencies allows Amazon to reach additional institutional buyers and reduces its dependence on the U.S. investment-grade market at any one point in time.
That matters because signs of investor fatigue have already appeared.
Amazon’s $25 billion U.S. bond offering in July received weaker demand than the company had historically experienced, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters.
Across the wider hyperscaler market, subscription levels have also fallen as investors absorb extraordinary volumes of new technology debt.
The sterling transaction produced a noticeably different result.
More than £12 billion of demand against £4.25 billion of supply enabled Amazon to expand the deal and tighten pricing.
That does not establish that sterling funding is structurally cheaper than dollar funding — different benchmark interest rates, maturities, currencies and hedging costs make such a comparison considerably more complicated.
But it does demonstrate something strategically valuable:
Amazon has found another deep capital market capable of absorbing billions of dollars of its debt.
Alphabet proved the market before Amazon arrived
Amazon is not entering an entirely untested market.
Alphabet made its own major sterling debut in February, raising £5.5 billion across five tranches.
Most unusually, the Google parent included a £1 billion 100-year bond carrying a 6.125% coupon.
Demand for that century bond alone approached ten times the amount offered, according to IFR data cited by Reuters.
The success demonstrated that British pension funds, insurers and other institutional investors were prepared to buy unusually long-dated debt from large technology companies.
Amazon’s longest sterling maturity is much shorter at 19 years, but its £4.25 billion transaction reinforces the same broader trend.
Big Tech is no longer financing the AI buildout primarily through U.S. cash flows and U.S. capital markets.
Its infrastructure requirements are becoming global enough that the financing itself is becoming global.
More than $200 billion of hyperscaler bonds — and counting
Amazon’s borrowing is part of a technology-sector financing wave unprecedented in scale.
Hyperscalers have already issued more than $200 billion of debt during 2026, more than double their issuance for all of 2025, according to LSEG data reported by Reuters.
By July 7, approximately $194 billion had already been issued.
Goldman Sachs has estimated that hyperscaler issuance could reach approximately $250 billion in 2026 and $400 billion in 2027.
The implications extend beyond technology companies.
The European Central Bank has warned that large U.S. hyperscalers tapping European bond markets could potentially absorb investor capacity that would otherwise finance European corporations, putting upward pressure on borrowing costs for other issuers.
This means the AI infrastructure race is beginning to influence not only semiconductor markets, data-centre construction and electricity demand, but the global price and allocation of capital itself.
The risk investors now have to assess
Amazon’s sterling debut was strongly subscribed, but the larger financing strategy introduces a question investors will increasingly have to confront:
how much debt can the AI infrastructure cycle absorb before the economics have to prove themselves?
Amazon remains an exceptionally large and profitable company.
Its second-quarter revenue reached $200.6 billion, operating income reached $27.5 billion, and trailing 12-month operating cash flow reached $161.4 billion.
But the scale of investment is equally extraordinary.
A $220 billion capital expenditure programme is larger than the annual economic output of many countries.
Cash capital expenditure increased more than 70% in the first half.
Free cash flow has moved negative.
And Amazon’s unsecured senior-note balance had already almost doubled by the end of June.
None of those figures, individually, indicates financial stress.
Together, however, they illustrate how radically AI is changing the financial architecture of Big Tech.
For years, the largest U.S. technology companies were defined partly by huge cash balances, extraordinary free cash flow and relatively conservative borrowing.
The AI race is creating something different.
Cloud companies increasingly resemble large-scale infrastructure operators: committing enormous amounts of capital years in advance, building data centres, acquiring chips, securing electricity and networking capacity, and using global bond markets to spread the cost across decades.
The Founders view
Amazon’s £4.25 billion sterling debut should therefore be understood as much more than a successful bond sale.
The most revealing number is not £4.25 billion.
It is the approximately $97.7 billion of bond issuance The Founders calculates Amazon has undertaken across global markets in 2026.
It is the rise in unsecured senior notes from $68 billion to $132.1 billion in six months.
It is $96.3 billion of cash capital expenditure in the first half alone.
And it is a projected $220 billion full-year capital programme being deployed while AWS revenue is accelerating 37% and contracted future service commitments have reached almost half a trillion dollars.
That combination explains Amazon’s strategy.
The company is using its strong credit profile and enormous future cloud commitments to transform today’s demand for AI computing into long-term financing capacity.
The sterling market has now become another part of that machine.
More than £12 billion of orders show that investors are still prepared to finance it.
The larger question — for Amazon, its competitors and the global bond market — is how long that appetite can keep pace with an AI infrastructure race whose capital requirements continue to rise.
For now, Amazon has secured another $5.8 billion.
The more consequential story is that one of the world’s most cash-generative companies is becoming one of its most aggressive technology borrowers — and 2026 may mark the year Big Tech’s AI race became a global capital-markets phenomenon.
