Amazon raised $54 billion in dollar and euro debt back in March, and it still wasn't enough.
Now the company just tapped a brand-new currency for cash, and investors lined up to buy.
Picking the Swiss franc market is an odd move for a Seattle retailer, but that's exactly the point.
The Deal In Plain English
Amazon priced six bonds at once, with terms running from three years out to twenty-five years. Spreads landed near the middle of where bankers first floated them, which means demand was healthy without being too hot.
The total came to 2.82 billion Swiss francs, or roughly $3.6 billion in U.S. money.
A bond is just an IOU. Amazon is borrowing cash from investors and promising to pay it back with interest, and splitting the deal into six parts gives the company room to spread out when each chunk comes due.
BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan ran the offering, and Amazon told reporters the cash will go to general business needs, including AI spending and paying off older debt.
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Why Big Tech Is Shopping Overseas
Amazon isn't alone here. Alphabet pulled off a similar move in February, hitting 3 billion francs in what was the biggest Swiss franc bond any company had ever sold.
Amazon's own euro bond from March was the largest euro corporate deal on record.
Why? Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle have told investors they'll spend about $725 billion combined on big projects this year, with almost all of that money going into AI gear like data centers, servers, and chips.
Funding numbers that big from one market is tough, so the giants are spreading their borrowing across dollars, euros, Swiss francs, sterling, Canadian dollars, and yen. Think of it like a family pulling cash from every checking account they have instead of draining just one.
What To Watch
Some investors are starting to ask whether all this AI spending will pay off. Data-center bond prices slid late last month after reports that OpenAI fell short of its own user and sales targets.
Amazon's own cloud unit just grew faster than it has in three years. But the spending to drive that growth came in at $44.2 billion, well above what Wall Street was modeling, which means build-out costs are running hotter than planned.
The bond market keeps saying yes, but the earnings have to start saying yes too.
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