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Companies are burning through exorbitant sums of money to keep pace in the AI arms race. Debt is climbing<\/a>. Amidst this flurry of activity, Amazon has signed a deal to borrow some $17.5 billion from a number of financial lenders, according to Bloomberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n The banks behind the loan reportedly<\/a> include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC, and BofA Securities. The deal has been characterized as a delayed draw term loan<\/a>, meaning Amazon can draw down the funds on its own timeline rather than taking the full sum upfront, giving it flexibility in how and when the money gets deployed.<\/p>\n The loan comes just two days after it was reported that Amazon would also raise $14 billion in a Canadian bond sale<\/a>, bringing its total new financing to roughly $31.5 billion in the span of roughly 48 hours.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear exactly how Amazon plans to spend all the new money. Reuters notes that<\/a> the new loan will be used for \u201cgeneral corporate purposes.\u201d TechCrunch has reached out to Amazon for more information.<\/p>\n Amazon is hardly alone. To fund new AI infrastructure like chips and data centers, companies are leveraging historic capex. Increasingly, companies are borrowing money<\/a> to fund their massive AI buildouts. The question investors and analysts are increasingly asking isn\u2019t whether this spending is necessary \u2014 it\u2019s whether the returns will ever justify it.<\/p>\n The scale of the borrowing is striking even by Silicon Valley standards. About a week ago, Google parent company Alphabet said that it planned to raise $80 billion<\/a> through a stock sale designed to help \u201cfund its investments in a balanced way while retaining a healthy balance sheet.\u201d Meta has also announced plans to raise $30 billion in a bond sale<\/a> \u2014 its largest ever.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n