The forecast lands at a moment when credit markets are already digesting record-breaking borrowing from tech companies, and the appetite shows no signs of slowing. On the secured debt side, US data center debt hit $25.4 billion in 2025, a 112% year-over-year increase. MediaTek recently approved a $5 billion financing package specifically to boost production capacity for AI data center chips. The result is a structural pivot toward debt financing, with workloads that were previously covered by surplus cash now requiring external capital. A supply chain increasingly optimized for centralized AI data centers could make decentralized alternatives more expensive to build and operate.