Morgan Stanley tops Wall Street's list of underwriters of AI-related bond deals
The bank has become the core designer of financing solutions supporting the boom in the artificial intelligence industry. The bank has innovatively designed various stock and debt financing models to provide tens of billions of dollars in funding for the construction of large-scale data centers. Several industry executives said that since last year, Morgan Stanley has become the leading investment bank with the largest scale and most innovative solutions for AI infrastructure financing projects. Endorsed data center developer Tera Wulf's US$3.2 billion bond financing; Meta cooperated with Blue Owl Capital on a US$27 billion debt financing package for the Hyperion data center project; and recently provided advisory services to Broadcom's US$35 billion chip financing transaction. Data shows that the explosive growth of AI-related financing business helped Morgan Stanley surpass long-term competitors in equity and debt capital market underwriting fees in the first half of the year , total underwriting fees reached US$2.3 billion, a significant increase from US$1.4 billion in the same period last year. The bank's global capital market underwriting ranking rose from fourth last year to second place, second only to A series of financing transactions clearly reflect that artificial intelligence is reshaping the technology industry and capital market landscape. Investment banks no longer rely solely on traditional project financing or corporate entity loans, but instead innovate and build new financing structures: long-term computing power lease contracts and the robust balance sheets of technology giants are packaged into standardized securities and sold to public institutional investors. This type of innovative financing tools has greatly broadened the sources of funding for AI infrastructure, and at the same time deeply bound the entire financial system to the continued demand for AI computing power. Mo Asumour, co-head of Morgan Stanley's investment bank, said: "In the past, financing projects of US$1 billion, US$2 billion, or US$5 billion are now easily reaching US$10 billion, US$20 billion or even higher." Silicon Valley technology giants say their existing computing power cannot meet customer order demands and continue to increase capital expenditures. Morgan Stanley estimates that total global investment in AI infrastructure will reach US$10 trillion in the next few years. The key to obtaining low-cost, hundreds of billions of financing is to introduce Google, Such companies are endorsed by hyper-scale cloud vendors; these companies maintain high-quality and healthy balance sheets when entering the AI track. As long as any one of them guarantees the data center lease agreement, the project financing cost will be roughly halved directly.