BoE opens inquiry into AI data-center lending

The Bank of England said on Friday it has opened an inquiry into a growing trend of financiers lending to data centers as a way to place large bets on the future of artificial intelligence, warning that rapid, debt-financed expansion of AI infrastructure could pose risks to financial stability. The central bank said the shift in corporate spending from hiring to constructing massive data centers has prompted closer scrutiny of the market and its links to banks and other lenders.

The BOE said lenders and private-credit providers are increasingly financing data center builds because direct public ways to invest in AI — such as listed AI-native companies or large-scale tokenization of private equity — remain limited. That has made data center lending a visible channel for concentrated investment in the sector at a time when demand for compute and power is surging. McKinsey & Company estimates roughly 6.7 trillion will be required by 2030 to expand data centers, power generation and other infrastructure to meet expected AI demand.

“If the projected scale of debt-financed AI and associated energy infrastructure investment materializes over this decade, financial stability risks are...