S&P Global: data center deals hit $61B globally in 2025; debt issuance nearly doubled YoY to $182B, with Meta raising $62B debt since 2022, ~50% of that in 2025
Global data centers dealmaking surged to hit another record high this year, driven by a rush to build out the infrastructure required for energy-intensive AI workloads.
Context & Ripple Effects
Data-center investment was already accelerating before this milestone: earlier coverage found US private data-center construction spending had more than doubled from late 2022, while Asia-Pacific transactions were poised to exceed their prior annual record.
The new figures show that the buildout is increasingly being funded through capital markets. Meta’s borrowing acceleration also follows reports that companies including Meta were using SPVs to finance AI data centers outside their core balance sheets.
First-order effects
- Data-center owners, developers and their financing partners gain a much larger pool of deal and debt capital for AI-oriented buildouts, with global deal value reaching $61B and issuance reaching $182B.
- Meta has materially increased its reliance on debt to fund infrastructure: roughly half of its $62B raised since 2022 was raised in 2025.
Second-order effects
- The rise in debt funding puts greater weight on lenders’ and investors’ willingness to underwrite long-lived data-center assets, rather than leaving expansion dependent solely on companies’ cash flows.
- Competitors pursuing similarly large AI buildouts face pressure to broaden financing structures, including the SPV-based financing approach already used by some peers.
Third-order effects
- If sustained, AI infrastructure could become a more financialized asset class, with debt and project-style vehicles playing a larger role in allocating compute capacity.
- That shift may separate companies able to secure large, durable financing from those that cannot, making access to capital an increasingly important constraint on AI infrastructure scale.
The trend: AI-driven data-center expansion is shifting from a capex surge into a capital-markets-funded infrastructure cycle.