By Saeed Azhar, Nupur Anand and Tatiana Bautzer
NEW YORK, July 15 (Reuters) – A rush by technology companies to fund AI infrastructure is boosting dealmaking and financing activity for Wall Street, bankers said on Tuesday, generating lucrative fees from capital raising and loans.
Investment banks have reaped strong fees from AI-related deals, including SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion ADR offering and SpaceX’s record $86 billion initial public offering, as well as debt issuance.
But July has been rough for technology stocks, especially microchip makers, as investors wrestle with high valuations and question the longevity of the AI capex boom.
‘MULTI-YEAR CYCLE’
“The build-out of AI infrastructure remains in its early stages, and we believe this multi-year investment cycle will continue to drive elevated levels of strategic activity, financing, and capital formation across markets,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said during an earnings call. Solomon added that the industry “is in the middle of an AI capex super cycle” where there are demands to utilize every single financing instrument.
Goldman Sachs was the lead left underwriter on the SpaceX IPO, and is also poised to play a major role alongside Morgan Stanley in the upcoming listing of Anthropic, as investors seek exposure to the AI boom.
Rival OpenAI has also filed for a U.S. IPO.
Citigroup, which was a joint global co-ordinator on the SK Hynix sale, earned over $70 million from the deal.
Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick told an analysts’ call on Wednesday that the AI capital expenditure expectations continue to move up.
“The forecast for 2026 on data center CapEx that was taken late last year around November of ’25 was that $575 billion would be spent this year and it’s coming in at about $850 billion,” he said.
“And that for 2027, the view was it would be around $700 billion, and now it’s projected at $1.3 trillion. And 2028 could be at $1.5 trillion.”
Morgan Stanley estimates the total amount of AI-related capex may reach $10 trillion in many years.
Morgan Stanley can act as an adviser, financier and allocator to the sector, Pick said.
AI DOMINATING CONVERSATIONS: CITI
Citi CEO Jane Fraser told investors on its conference call that AI was “dominating a lot of the conversation” with spending on technology, data centers, energy and defense accelerating.
Bank of America recently extended a $520 million credit line to OpenAI, its first loan to the AI company, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
“Overall, the U.S. economy has proved more durable than expected, supported by the strong consumer, ongoing AI-driven investments across the board and easing energy costs, though inflation and tighter monetary policy remain key risks,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said on a conference call.
BofA has helped raise nearly $500 billion for AI-related companies since 2025, accounting for 60% of such fundraising across investment-grade debt, leveraged finance and equity capital markets, according to internal data seen by Reuters.
“The AI-driven capex super cycle has benefited equity issuance, M&A activity and debt financing,” said Stephen Biggar, director of financial services research at Argus Research.
Larger rival JPMorgan Chase has also been involved with AI-related companies on fundraising and is financing data centers.
Meta Platforms is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase on a roughly $13 billion financing package for a data center in El Paso, Texas, Reuters reported in May, citing a source familiar with the matter.
JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said the firm is seeing decent capital expenditure and loan demand from companies that may not be AI-related, but have an indirect link.
“It’s like the comments about data centers wind up creating a lot of demand for plumbers and electricians, so you wind up seeing it in sort of slightly non-obvious places,” he said.
Barnum added that it was hard to say if such demand was AI-related.
(Reporting by Saeed Azhar and Nupur Anand; additional reporting by Tatiana Bautzer and Utkarsh Shetti; editing by Megan Davies and Rod Nickel)