Wall Street is turning AI’s massive electricity appetite into a $61 billion bond market

Every interaction with AI uses electricity in a data center. Servers calculate the answer, cooling equipment carries away the heat, and network connections send the result back to the user.Multiply that process across millions of requests and the electric bill becomes one of the facility's highest costs, while access to enough power determines how much computing the building can support and how much money it can earn.Wall Street is now packaging that income into bonds. Once a data center is open and has paying customers, its owner can transfer the facility and its contracts to a separate legal entity that issues debt. Investors are repaid from the rent and service fees paid by the data center's customers after expenses such as electricity, maintenance, taxes, and insurance are covered.The collateral extends beyond rent, covering the property, its essential systems, customer agreements, and the business that keeps everything running. Electricity appears as an expense in the cash-flow waterfall, so power prices and deliverable megawatts can shape the bond almost as much as tenant credit.In February, S&P assigned an A(sf) rating to Sabey Data Center Issuer's $475 million 2026-1 no...