Bond Deals of the Year: Investment grade corporates — Corporate issuers go hyperscale

Sometimes the best names are the ones you don’t have to google. Alphabet, the parent company of the ubiquitous search engine, smashed into the euro market in April with a €6.75bn curve building deal across five tranches.

The sale won a thunderous reception. Demand was more akin to the European sovereign, supranational and agency market, with books topping €31.5bn by the time final terms were set. Another €6.5bn deal followed in October, making Alphabet the most active issuer in euros this year.

Alphabet brought dollar bond execution sensibilities to the euro market with a deal that spanned the curve, including one of the longest tranches of the year. For that reason, it is GlobalCapital’s Corporate Bond Deal of the Year.

US borrowers spent much of 2025 crossing the Atlantic to tap the euro market for cheaper funding, finding plenty of success across the curve for senior debt. But the euro market had to wait until the end of the year for the first Reverse Yankee hybrids.

Reverse Yankee hybrid supply returned to Europe’s bond market after a long absence thanks to a debut deal from US telecoms firm Verizon.

Not content with issuing the first US corporate hybrids in either euros or sterling in recent memory, Verizon issued the biggest subordinated corporate prints in either currency since BP’s record-setting 2020 deals.

And it did so at a tight spread, with analysts putting the difference between its senior and subordinated debt at 85bp for euros and 100bp for sterling. Verizon’s dual tranche outing proved just how attractive and deep the euro and sterling markets can be for Reverse Yankee hybrid paper.

Across the Atlantic, hyperscalers have spent much of 2025 ramping up spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and raising the cash to pay for it in the bond market.

Chief among them was Meta, which swooped into the dollar market in late October to seize $30bn across six tranches ranging from five to 40 years. The $30bn outing was the largest sale in the US high grade bond market since Pfizer raised $31bn two years before, with the new bonds backed by a record level of demand for the currency.

Meta’s deal arrived during a hot period for AI financing. Just two weeks earlier, it had raised $27bn through a joint private project finance bond venture with Blue Owl Capital to fund a data centre project in Louisiana off balance sheet. Meanwhile, fellow hyperscaler Oracle scooped $18bn from the market in September to help support its own AI capex.

AI spending is set to rocket over the coming years, with the market expecting many more deals like Meta’s. The AI frenzy may yet still prove to be a bubble but for now, deals like Meta’s show that the market has more than enough demand to match the hype.

SSAs might have pioneered the green bond market almost 20 years ago but corporate issuers were the first to use the nascent European Green Bond (EuGB) standard this year.

Italian utilities firm A2A smashed through fair value with the first EuGB deal in January, tightening by 40bp from initial price thoughts.

The official EU green stamp of approval helped A2A draw sticky demand of more than €3.5bn for its €500m print and inspired a raft of issuers to follow.

The deal was a ringing endorsement of green finance in a year dominated by US president Donald Trump’s strongly pro fossil fuel and anti-ESG turn.

In fact, just three days before A2A hit the market, Trump re-entered office, where one of his first decisions was to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement for a second time and roll back a swathe of climate regulations, while vowing to “drill, baby, drill”.

A2A proved that European issuers and investors are still committed to the green agenda.

UK issuers in sterling have found themselves well bid. Issuers like the London Stock Exchange Group and Southern Water have managed to achieve books far in excess of their deal sizes. But it was Transport for London’s (TfL) return to the market that stood out.

Investors leapt at the chance to pick up the first paper from TfL in over a decade, propelling the peak book for London’s transport operator to 7.7 times the £350m deal size.

TfL picked a perfect window to relaunch its curve. Thanks to the sheer amount of demand stacked behind the note, the UK borrower was able to price at what was until then the tightest spread of the year so far for a sterling deal. And even then, it still landed 3bp through fair value.

Given the deal’s success, investors will hope they won’t have to wait too long for the next one.

The Matterhorn may no longer adorn the front of the Toblerone box, but it is still alive and kicking in the Swiss franc market.

Thermo Fisher’s five-tranche deal was the largest US corporate bond in Swiss francs in history and landed almost exactly a year after the firm’s debut, which itself was the first Matterhorn — a foreign deal of more than Sfr1bn ($1.25bn) — in seven years.

On its debut, Thermo Fisher offered four, eight and 12 year tranches. The question became how an issuer could improve on that. The answer: target the ultra-short and ultra-long ends and offer something for everyone.

The company drummed up enough impressive demand to make issuing the second quintuple-tranche Swiss deal in the last 20 years a reality.

Swiss bankers often test the limits of what is possible when it comes to funding arbitrage, but less frequently do they push for size for issuers for whom price is not the primary concern. But Thermo Fisher’s five tranche outing earlier this year shows the Swiss market is not just for those seeking the ch