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The Box: Hyperscaler fee league table

Written by Josephine Richardson & Johan Jarnmo

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Hyperscalers — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle — are on a debt issuance spree to fund the AI infrastructure build-out, on track to represent 9% of total USD investment grade issuance in 2026. This capital is flowing somewhere, and banks are earning handsomely to arrange it. AFII has applied its Box methodology to rank who’s winning the hyperscaler wallet — and what it means alongside their fossil and green activity.

In the past year, the five hyperscalers generated USD572.5mn in syndication fees — 42% of what the same banks earned from fossil deals. Citi leads the table with USD101mn and the highest hyperscaler fee ratio at 4.3%. Business is highly concentrated: the top five banks captured 55% of the total wallet.

The comparison with fossil and green fees is revealing. Four banks — Morgan Stanley, HSBC, BNP Paribas and NatWest — earned more from hyperscaler deals than from fossil ones. BNP Paribas stands out: USD17.8mn in hyperscaler fees against just USD9.5mn in fossil fees, and USD125.8mn in green fees — a very different profile to a bank like Wells Fargo, which earned USD103.5mn from fossil against USD18.1mn from green.

As the energy demand implications of AI infrastructure become clearer, hyperscaler fees are no longer just a technology story — they sit squarely in the transition finance picture

About the authors

Josephine Richardson

Josephine Richardson

Managing Director, Head of Research

Based in London, Jo leads AFII’s research and a global team supporting fixed income investors as they align their portfolios with climate and sustainability goals. She joined AFII after 18 years in fixed income markets at JPMorgan.

Johan Jarnmo

Johan Jarnmo

Associate Director, Portfolio Strategy

Johan develops tools and analytics that help fixed income investors invest in a climate- and nature-positive way, including AFII’s portfolio tools Co₂liseum and FIONA. He previously worked in Deloitte’s Risk Advisory practice.

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