The World Tied $3.5 Trillion-Plus of Debt to Inflation. The Costs Are Now Adding Up.
With roughly $770 billion of borrowings linked to retail prices, Britain is feeling the pinch
5 min
Governments and companies around the world spent decades loading up on trillions of dollars of debt whose interest costs rise and fall alongside inflation. But what served as cheap funding when prices were stagnant has rapidly become more expensive.
The inflation-linked headache echoes the broader challenges arising at the end of more than a decade of global easy money, in which debtors borrowed vast amounts at very low, and sometimes negative, interest rates. Investors are on alert for financial vulnerabilities after a crisis in U.S. regional banks this year, and with strains emerging in commercial property.
Borrowing costs of all sorts have risen sharply for governments, businesses and consumers, as central banks have raised key interest rates to combat price pressures. Rates have surged on inflation-linked borrowings, but these aren’t the only source of pain.
As standard bonds with fixed rates mature, they need to be replaced with more expensive new debt. Meanwhile, interest rates on loans are often floating, meaning they quickly reflect changes in policy rates.
Yields on benchmark 10-year fixed-rate bonds, a proxy for government borrowing costs, have climbed to about 4.3% for the U.K. and 3.9% for the U.S. Both were below 1% during the pandemic.
Governments will pay roughly $2.2 trillion in overall debt interest this year, Fitch Ratings estimates. The U.S. Treasury’s interest cost grew 25% to $652 billion in the nine months through June. Germany’s debt-servicing bill is expected to soar to 30 billion euros this year, or some $33.2 billion, from €4 billion in 2021.
Governments had $3.5 trillion in outstanding inflation-linked debt at the end of 2022, according to the Bank for International Settlements, equivalent to about 11% of their total borrowings.
The poster child for the inflation-linked problem is Britain, which has experienced the fastest rise in debt costs in the Group of Seven advanced democracies. The U.K. first embraced such debt under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and in 1981 became one of the first developed economies to issue inflation-linked debt: securities that are known as linkers there and Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS, in the U.S. Both the amount due to investors once the bonds mature and the regular interest payments they receive move with inflation.
About a quarter of U.K. debt is now tied to inflation, trailing only a handful of emerging markets with a history of runaway prices such as Uruguay, Brazil and Chile.
“We stick out like a sore thumb,” said Sanjay Raja, chief U.K. economist at Deutsche Bank.
The U.K.’s debt woes are complicated by its longstanding reliance on a measure of price increases that has fallen out of favour: the retail price index, or RPI. Some 600 billion pounds, equivalent to roughly $770 billion, of bonds are linked to this gauge, which has consistently risen faster than more widely used consumer-price indexes. London has pledged to phase out RPI by 2030.
Inflation as measured by the RPI topped 14% in October and was still 11% in June compared with a year earlier. Economists expect U.K. inflation to keep falling this year, albeit more slowly than in other major economies.
In theory, higher interest payouts should be balanced by rising revenue. While higher inflation means bigger payouts to bondholders, it should also bring in more taxes.
That logic holds especially true in markets like the U.K., where inflation gauges are deeply embedded in the economy. Tax thresholds, pension and welfare payments, rail fares and cellphone bills are often linked to price indexes.
But the energy shock that fuelled recent inflation upended that math, since higher energy bills drove up RPI even as earnings and consumer spending lagged behind. The U.K. is experiencing the “wrong sort of inflation,” the U.K.’s Office for Budget Responsibility said this month. The sensitivity of U.K. debt to inflation was unprecedented, the watchdog said.
The U.K.’s debt sustainability is a focus for investors after a market meltdown last fall, triggered by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’s tax-cutting plans.
Her successor Rishi Sunak and his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt have sought to restore market confidence with pledges to contain inflation and bring down debt. As the U.K.’s interest costs climb, and with debt now surpassing 100% of gross domestic product, those promises are getting harder to keep while maintaining investor confidence.
The debt burden also undermines Sunak’s hopes to woo voters and revive the economy with tax cuts and spending measures ahead of a general election expected to take place next year.
“We could quickly be in a situation where we’re facing some renewed sense of crisis, particularly with an economic backdrop of stagflation with really weak growth and overshooting inflation,” said Mark Dowding, chief investment officer at RBC BlueBay Asset Management in London. “Further policy missteps could easily be punished by the market.”
Higher bond yields and stickier inflation will add an extra £30 billion to the U.K.’s annual government debt bill, estimates Bank of America economist Robert Wood.
“The government has three options: You can plan for weaker spending, you could raise taxes or you could borrow more,” he said. “Certainly one could say that this rise in debt-interest costs is incompatible with cutting taxes.”
The U.K. is selling fewer linkers, which are likely to make up 11% of bond issuance this fiscal year, down from above 20% throughout the 2010s.
One veteran U.K. central banker said linkers had largely done their job as envisioned in the 1980s.
“We were coming out of a decade in which inflation had been extremely high. People were very skeptical about the ability of any government, particularly the Conservative government, to bring inflation down to a low and stable rate,” said Charles Goodhart, who was an adviser at the Bank of England between 1969 and 1985.
Fears that linkers would lead to fresh wage-price spirals as unions demanded inflation-linked increases, didn’t play out, he said. Thatcher, who called inflation “the destroyer of all,” saw linkers as “sleeping policemen,” ensuring the government wasn’t tempted to let inflation run to help inflate debt away.
“It makes the current fiscal position more difficult. But that’s what Mrs. Thatcher actually wanted,” said Goodhart. “She wanted governments to resist inflation more strongly.”
Companies are also feeling the pressure from inflation-linked borrowing. The U.K.’s largest water company, Thames Water, nearly collapsed in recent weeks as investors questioned its ability to repay £14 billion in debt, about half of which is linked to inflation. Thames Water’s debt is RPI-linked, but customer prices now track CPI, which lags behind the RPI by about 3 percentage points more slowly.
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Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
4 minA sharp technology sell-off has exposed a new anxiety on global markets: whether the enormous borrowing behind the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom can generate sufficient returns as interest rates rise and Chinese competition intensifies.
The artificial-intelligence investment boom has powered technology shares, semiconductor manufacturers and data-centre operators to extraordinary heights. Last week, investors were given a reminder that much of this expansion is being built with borrowed money.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.5 per cent over the week ended October 16, its weakest performance since late June. Semiconductor shares suffered an even deeper correction, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index losing about 11.4 per cent.
The selling spread quickly through global markets. Micron Technology fell 14.6 per cent over the week, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix dropped approximately 18 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
This was more than a routine bout of profit-taking. Investors were reassessing three interconnected risks: higher interest rates, the rapidly expanding debt burden attached to AI infrastructure and the prospect of stronger competition from Chinese memory-chip manufacturers.
The debt behind the AI build-out
Artificial intelligence requires a physical infrastructure network of enormous scale. Data centres must be built, advanced processors purchased, power supplies secured and cooling systems installed before customers begin generating meaningful revenue from them.
Technology companies are increasingly supplementing their own cash with corporate bonds, syndicated loans, equipment leases, private credit and project-level financing.
JPMorgan describes the emerging funding model as a combination of conventional corporate borrowing and project finance tied to individual data-centre assets. In Australia, the Reserve Bank estimates that syndicated loans accounted for approximately three-quarters of data-centre financing during 2025 and 2026 to date.
The numbers are becoming large enough to affect broader credit markets. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has cited Wall Street estimates suggesting AI-related investment-grade bond issuance could approach US$300 billion in 2026 alone.
That borrowing is not automatically problematic. Debt can be an efficient way to finance long-lived infrastructure when future revenue is sufficiently predictable. The concern is that AI technology, customer demand and computing economics are changing much faster than the repayment schedules attached to the assets.
A data centre financed today may carry debt for years. Investors must therefore make assumptions about future utilisation rates, electricity prices, chip performance, customer concentration and the amount businesses will ultimately pay for AI computing.
When interest rates rise, those assumptions become less forgiving.
Inflation changes the calculation
September’s US inflation data intensified the pressure. Consumer prices increased 3.7 per cent over the year, ahead of market expectations and up from 3.4 per cent in August.
The hotter reading reduced confidence that interest rates would fall quickly and pushed bond yields higher. That matters particularly for companies whose valuations depend on profits expected well into the future, as well as highly leveraged infrastructure operators that may need to refinance.
CoreWeave has emerged as a closely watched test case. The specialist cloud-computing company has accumulated substantial debt and lease obligations to build AI capacity, while relying on a concentrated group of large technology customers.
Its shares fell sharply during the sell-off, while the cost of insuring its debt against default climbed. CoreWeave has argued that its contracted backlog more than covers its obligations and that financial markets do not always understand its business model. Nevertheless, its securities have become a proxy for investor confidence in debt-funded AI infrastructure.
Oracle, another major investor in AI computing capacity, fell 8.8 per cent in Friday trading, while CoreWeave dropped 15.5 per cent.
The question is shifting from how much AI infrastructure can be built to how profitably it can be operated.
China adds another source of pressure
Interest rates were not the only catalyst. Reports of advances by Chinese memory-chip producer ChangXin Memory Technologies raised concerns that lower-cost Chinese products could increase competition across the global semiconductor industry.
Memory chips are essential to AI systems, but the industry is historically cyclical. Periods of tight supply and high pricing can encourage rapid investment, eventually producing oversupply and falling margins.
The prospect of a well-funded Chinese competitor expanding its technological capabilities unsettled investors in Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It also demonstrated that AI-related demand does not insulate chipmakers from conventional competitive pressures.
That combination—slower rate cuts, more expensive financing and potentially cheaper supply—challenged the assumption that every company exposed to AI would enjoy continually expanding margins.
A reset rather than the end of the boom
The sell-off does not establish that the AI boom is ending. Demand for computing power remains strong, the largest technology companies continue to generate formidable cash flows and many infrastructure projects are backed by long-term customer contracts.
What has changed is the market’s willingness to overlook the price and financing structure of that growth.
The most resilient companies are likely to be those able to fund investment from operating cash flow, secure long-duration customers and demonstrate that new capacity will earn returns comfortably above its financing costs.
More speculative operators may face greater scrutiny, particularly where debt is expensive, customers are concentrated or expected revenue depends on demand that has not yet materialised.
For Australian investors, the lesson extends beyond US technology shares. Local data-centre operators, infrastructure funds, electricity suppliers and property groups are increasingly exposed to the same investment cycle.
Artificial intelligence may remain one of the defining growth themes of the decade. But last week’s correction showed that enthusiasm for the technology does not eliminate financial discipline.
The next stage of the AI boom will be judged not only by computing power, model performance or demand for chips, but by something more traditional: whether the assets being financed can generate enough cash to repay the money borrowed to build them.
Fact box
Nasdaq Composite: Down 4.5 per cent for the week ended October 16, 2026
Philadelphia Semiconductor Index: Down approximately 11.4 per cent
Micron Technology: Down approximately 14.6 per cent
Samsung Electronics: Down approximately 18 per cent
SK Hynix: Down approximately 24 per cent
US September inflation: 3.7 per cent annually
Estimated 2026 AI-related investment-grade issuance: Approximately US$300 billion
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