The Bank of England (BOE) has reportedly opened an investigation into money lending to data centers amid fears that a collapse in the value of AI companies could cause chaos in the financial markets.

According to a report from Bloomberg, a source at the UK’s central bank said the billions of dollars being spent on building new data centers around the world had triggered action.

While much of the AI data center build-out has been funded through equity, some companies are taking on large amounts of debt to finance construction projects and purchase expensive hardware such as GPUs.

At the same time, fears about an AI bubble and the impact that this bubble bursting would have on the wider economy continue to grow. AI stocks currently account for 44 percent of the market cap of the S&P Top 500 companies in the US, and AI spending contributed 1.1 percent of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025.

The circular nature of many recently announced deals – with suppliers funding their customers and vice versa – has also spooked some economists.

The source said the BOE is keen to unpack the interconnected nature of many of the deals in the sector, as well as look at the proportion of spending that has shifted from hiring staff to building infrastructure that has limited alternative uses.

They added that securitized investments, where money is lent against the future value of the asset it is financing – in this case, the data center – could be an area of indirect exposure for financial institutions.

According to figures from the Bank of America, there is $48 billion in data center asset-backed and commercial mortgage-backed securities outstanding, 61 percent of the total outstanding securities market.

The BOE declined to comment when approached by Bloomberg, but in a blog posted on Friday, the bank sounded cautious about growing AI-related debt.

“AI investment has been an outsized driver of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025,” the blog post said. “The dot com bubble did contribute to a mild US recession, driven by falling business investment. A fall in AI-related asset prices would happen in a significantly different macroeconomic context to the early 2000s.”

The post added that “if the projected scale of debt-financed AI and associated energy infrastructure investment materializes over this decade, financial stability risks are likely to grow.”

Banks, it argued, “would be exposed to this directly through their credit exposures to AI companies, as well as indirectly through their provision of loans and credit facilities to private credit funds and other financial institutions which are exposed to AI-impacted asset prices. The degree of risk, like all credit, would depend on its size and quality.”