Authored by Luke Coha via BondVigilantes.com,
As the world grapples with how AI will shape and change our lives going forward from the mundane, like automated homes or more clever apps, to more existential threats (opportunities?) leading to job and possibly sector obsolescence and related, broader social implications, it’s definitely well accepted that the demand for AI computing power is enormous and growing.
Estimates vary, but they are all astronomical, ranging from $5 trillion to $7 trillion in capital investment needed to fund the global data centre and AI buildout, including adding 122 GW of power capacity between now and 2030 (according to JP Morgan). This scale of investment will require involvement from virtually all sources of funding, including public capital markets, private credit, governments and asset-backed securitisation funding.
While not nearly on the same scale as investment grade markets, high yield markets have been playing, and will continue to play, a role in this buildout financing mostly via the funding of data centres. This has important implications for the asset class. In very short order, AI related and data centre issuance has exploded from effectively nothing just over a year ago to nearly $40 billion today, with close to $30 billion issued since the start of the year.
This sheer quantum of issuance is huge and effectively amounts to an entirely new subsector created nearly overnight within the high yield market. The vast majority of this issuance is index eligible and currently represents approximately 1.6% of the Global High Yield Bond Index (and 2.6% of the U.S. High Yield Bond Index). What’s more, from estimates we’ve seen, expectations are for total high yield, AI related issuance to reach $100 billion to $120 billion over the next few years.
Should this manifest, it would represent close to 4% to 5% of the global index and 6% to 7% of the U.S. index, of similar scale as long existing and well established retail and capital goods subsectors. This scale, coupled with mostly above index level yields, makes it difficult, if not impossible, for active managers that are benchmark-aware to ignore. It will be imperative to understand the broader narrative as well as the idiosyncratic characteristics of the individual issuers. As stated, this is effectively a new sector to the market and participants, such as analysts, strategists and fund managers, need to, if they haven’t already done so, get up to speed quickly.
At the time of writing there are now 15 high yield data centre bonds totalling $39 billion (including neocloud provider CoreWeave). High yield data centre bond issuance has coalesced around similar, project-finance-like features but with important variations.
Source: Bloomberg, Barclays Research. Note: excludes issuance by neocloud CoreWeave, which has $6.5bn of regular-way HY bonds outstanding
Generally, bonds are being issued with five-year non call two-year structures and mostly amortising. By definition these issuers will have more leverage than traditional IG issuers but some will have financial backstops from the likes of Google, while others will not. Most will have high-quality tenants like Nvidia, and hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, while others will have a variety of tenants. Some are single asset facilities while others are multi-site and multijurisdictional. Some will be well advanced in their construction timeline while others will have yet to have broken ground. Some will have contracted power supply including back up power, and some are still negotiating power supply agreements… you get the idea. And that’s leaving aside the complexities around lease terms, cost overrun provisions, covenants etc.
There are already rumblings in the high yield market surrounding concerns that the explosion in issuance has bubble-like characteristics similar to that of telecoms in the early 2000s or energy in 2015 to 2017, when investor enthusiasm outweighed a sober assessment of risk. These same critics also worry about the potential for overbuild or overcapacity, i.e. the massive demand fails to materialise, or that despite the strong tenant base, these contracts have yet to be tested.
Conversely, proponents of the nascent space point to the undeniable demand for more compute capacity and expectations that any individual project disruptions or failures would be tolerated by their well-heeled tenants who, with strong demand for capacity, would support any centres that came into difficulty; and if not, demand is so great, other well capitalised tenants would simply step in. Further, regardless of long term dynamics, there is massive demand now and any project that is up and running, or close to, has a first mover advantage and any capacity concerns etc. are for projects well down the development pipeline.
Further, some view this as an attractive ‘yield to call’ play, inferring that as these projects are up and running and generating more cash, the issuer will have the capacity to refinance their high coupon, high yield issues at more attractive terms, arguably creating a potential short term opportunity for high yield investors.
Ultimately, being completely short the space due to uncertainties requires a high degree of conviction that the sector is mispriced and even vulnerable. Conversely, going overweight the sector is an acceptance of a broader narrative that has only recently manifested itself. All of which highlights that careful credit work on individual issuers and a broader understanding of these dynamics is paramount.
Source: Meta
Bottom line, balancing this supply, index and yield dynamic versus fully understanding the fundamental, technical and issuer risks and rewards is a real challenge for high yield markets. And with all things AI related, we need to understand if this dynamic potentially represents – and if so, how to adapt to – to paraphrase Aldous Huxley, a Brave New World.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 05:00Your passport shapes how much of the world you can access. In 2026, the gap between the strongest and weakest passports spans nearly 170 destinations.
This graphic, via Visual Capitalists' Gabriel Cohen, ranks global passport strength using data from the Henley Passport Index, based on how many destinations citizens can enter without a visa.
Singapore leads with access to 192 destinations. That’s nearly five times the access available to citizens of the lowest-ranked countries. Meanwhile, the weakest passports allow entry to fewer than 50 destinations. The disparity highlights how geography, diplomacy, and stability influence global mobility.
The Top Passports of Asia and EuropeFollowing Singapore, there is a three-way tie for the second-strongest passports, with Japan, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates each offering access to 187 destinations without a visa.
The UAE has the strongest passport outside of East or Southeast Asia, though with a notable caveat: Emiratis lack visa-free access to the United States, unlike their peers in Singapore, Japan, or South Korea.
From there, Europeans hold many of the strongest passports by visa-free access, led by Northern and Western European countries like Norway and Switzerland (both 185).
While the 27-member European Union has a unified passport system, individual member countries still vary in visa-free access, ranging from 177 destinations for Bulgaria and Romania to 186 for Sweden.
Taking the average across this range, the EU’s overall passport strength stands at 183 visa-free destinations, tied with countries like Malaysia and the United Kingdom and slightly ahead of North American counterparts like Canada (182) and the United States (179).
The World’s Weakest PassportsAt the bottom of the ranking, mobility drops off dramatically. The weakest passports offer access to fewer than 50 destinations, less than a quarter of what top-ranked countries enjoy.
These countries often face political instability, high emigration, or recent conflict, which can limit access to many developed regions.
African countries like Nigeria (44), Somalia (32), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (43) also rank low. Fast-growing populations and large diasporas have contributed to tighter visa restrictions for these nationalities.
A Tale of Two PassportsTaken together, passport rankings reveal more than travel convenience—they map global inequality. Where you’re born can shape where you’re allowed to go, making passport power one of the clearest indicators of opportunity in a connected world.
African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian passports tend to rank lower than their European or Western Hemisphere counterparts. Even higher-ranking exceptions like Malaysia or the UAE can still face limits on visa-free access to major destinations, particularly the United States.
If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The United Arab Emirates has the World’s Most Affordable Passport on Voronoi.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 04:15Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
A trans Tamil immigrant on a temporary student visa has just been ELECTED as a Green Party MSP to Holyrood in Scotland – despite having no British citizenship, no permanent residency and no right to full-time work.
Where else would this be allowed to happen? It’s insane.
The candidate, Dr Q Manivannan (they/them), arrived in the UK a few years ago as a PhD student and was selected for the Green list in Edinburgh and the Lothians East. Scotland’s rules – relaxed under the SNP – explicitly allow non-citizens to stand for election and take office.
A trans Indian migrant who arrived in the UK a few years ago and is not a citizen or permanent resident was elected to the Scottish parliament as a member of the woke Green Party. Scotland allows non-citizens to become elected to office.
“Q Mannivannan” is set to earn over… pic.twitter.com/3ePA6B0le1
Trans Green Party candidate with no permanent British visa is elected to Holyrood https://t.co/KCSmyt3YuE
— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) May 10, 2026Manivannan’s own victory remarks left nothing to the imagination. “My name is Dr Q Manivannan, I am a transgender Tamil immigrant, my pronouns are they/them.” And later: “I am, to some in this country, everything that the hateful despise, and I’m standing here as your MSP now with care.”
Q Manivannan, transgender Indian migrant now Scottish Greens MSP, arguing for 'trans pride'.
"Transness is Blackness. Transness is womanhood. Transness is disability. Transness is everything the world wants you to believe that is unlovable."
He goes on to defend Mridul Wadhwa,… pic.twitter.com/HJOQ6bXqBQ
The individual is clearly not OK mentally.
He's also racist against White people and suffers extreme mental sickness according to his many posts about it all pic.twitter.com/GrEIiMqZu2
— ddsnorth ™ (@ddsnorth) May 10, 2026This is not an isolated stunt. The Green Party has become a conduit for an unholy alliance of islamists and gender ideology obsessives.
Deputy leader Mothin Ali was pictured alongside a trans candidate, the awkward expression speaking volumes.
The guy on the left is the Green Party's deputy leader, Mothin Ali; the woman on the right is one of his party's trans candidates. The look on his face says it all. Is there a future for this marriage of convenience between Islamist extremism and woke crankery? I doubt it. pic.twitter.com/v9JJWOkRR9
— Never Again (@Never_Again2020) May 9, 2026Other recent Green candidates reinforce the pattern. In Preston, new councillor “Tina” Balmer declared: “I want to help the city I love.”
? "I want to help the city I love" – Meet Preston's first ever Green Party councillor, Tina Balmer.??
Tina ffs! ?
Is it Tina but pronounced Trevor? ? pic.twitter.com/GkTmz9zJ4K
Here are more Green candidates that stood for election:
Wow these are Green Party Candidates ?
How would you describe this look? pic.twitter.com/FzA29MK4JT
A small compendium of Green Party candidates, make up your own mind about what this says about the state of British politics. pic.twitter.com/9X4nDULsJg
— Kevin Lister (@KevsTribulation) May 8, 2026"What’s interesting about these Green Party candidates is that they are actually men" pic.twitter.com/DkdTIuL4Ty
— Barry Robson (@barryrobson) May 8, 2026And here’s the support they’re drawing…
Say hello to 'Kate', from the Redbridge Green Party. Not mental at all… pic.twitter.com/xkVGaXBqXI
— RagingDissident_ (@JustRaging01) February 27, 2026They’ll lecture you all day long about ‘hate’, meanwhile…
How many Green Party Candidates investigated over antisemitic hate:
Just the thirty. pic.twitter.com/Nuftw4gVnz
Many of them simply don’t bother to speak English:
GB News host Martin Daubney can't understand the Green Party and neither can we!
Political candidates in Britain should speak English. pic.twitter.com/au6CkSRdVp
Meanwhile, UK Deputy Green Party leader had a meltdown when Piers Morgan asked if in her view women can have penises:
UK Deputy Green Party leader has meltdown after Piers Morgan asked if she thinks women can have “penises.”
“That’s a weird question. Piers it’s a weird question. The answer is the trans community in this country are treated appallingly.” pic.twitter.com/qWVPRg0fdU
He asked that question because during a previous exchange, Party leader Zack Polanski went full gender-ideologue, claiming women can have penises and dismissed biological reality.
The party is also pushing to teach schoolchildren they should have a “moral obligation” to accept mass immigration.
The Greens aren’t just pushing open borders and gender ideology – they are the vehicle that fuses the two into one destructive package.
Scotland’s sovereignty is now being exercised by people who aren’t even British citizens, while taxpayers foot the bill for six-figure salaries and the erosion of women’s rights, free speech and national identity.
This isn’t democracy. It’s demographic replacement dressed up as progress – and the Green Party is leading the parade.
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Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 03:30A recent report in Financial Times indicates the European Union is preparing for "potential" future talks with Russia and President Vladimir Putin at a moment of extreme doubts over both US military commitments and Russia's intentions in Ukraine.
Putin himself during his V-Day speech Saturday hinted for the first time that the conflict may be 'coming to an end':
"I think that the matter is coming to an end," Putin told reporters of the Russia-Ukraine war, Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
The Russian leader, however, added he would be willing to meet Zelensky only after the terms of a peace agreement had already been settled. The Kremlin had rejected US President Donald Trump’s August 2025 offer to hold a trilateral meeting with Zelenskyy, Putin and Trump.
"This should be the final point, not the negotiations themselves," Putin said after the Victory Day, which marks Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 in World War II.
Sputnik/ReutersAlso on Saturday, António Costa, the president of the European Council, said to a press conference the EU will only talk to Putin at the "right moment". Costa ultimately sees "potential" for direct EU engagement with Putin
"We need in the right moment to have talks with Russia to address our common issues with security," the EU president had said.
"We don’t want to disturb the initiative led by President Trump," said Costa at a ‘Europe Day’ celebration in Brussels. He also spoke of preparations aimed at being "ready to do what we need to do” regarding Europe’s security.
And separately an EU official said: "There will be a moment when the EU will need to speak to Russia because it’s an existential issue for Europe. Now it’s not the time."
President Trump has recently blasted NATO as a "paper tiger" (though it wasn't the first time) and has said the US is withdrawing 5,000 American troops from Germany.
In response, European governments have accelerated discussions on deeper EU military coordination, including joint defense initiatives which bypass US protection.
Currently, the three-day Ukraine ceasefire announced and backed by President Trump appears to have held throughout the weekend, as no drone attacks have been registered on Moscow or other parts of the country.
Trump had presented this as a window and opportunity to achieve a more permanent truce, and Putin is without doubt seizing on the initiative, but surely wants a final settlement in line with Kremlin aims in Ukraine.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 02:45Khalid Al-Hail is a defector from the Qatari ruling establishment, the president of the Qatar National Democratic Party, and the country’s most prominent opposition spokesman. Now living in exile in the United Kingdom, he is a successful international businessman and the leading advocate for democratic reform in Qatar, known for exposing the regime’s state-backed influence operations and media manipulation abroad.
I can’t believe how petty this sounds, but I really think western socialists are frightened that the fall of the Ayatollahs will split their vote base. Why on earth else would people whose hearts bled for Palestine be back out in the streets supporting a regime which has matched the death toll of Gaza in just a few months? The clue is in the prevailing ideology of the Western intelligentsia. The signs have been visible for years.
In 2022, a socialist political network within the European Union became embroiled in the so called ‘Qatargate’ scandal, involving cash bribes to close down debate about Qatar’s Human Rights abuses.
As Qatar’s democratic opposition in political exile, I was encouraged by a recent campaign to call the European Union’s attention to this and other abuses of Qatar’s governance in the West. Billboards decried the Al Jazeera Propaganda network, the human rights violations of Qatar’s indentured foreign workforce and Qatar’s constant support for proscribed terrorist organisations including the Taliban, Hamas and Al Qaeda – all of which has been going on for decades.
This is a message to the West and to my European friends!
The Al Thanis, Qatar's ruling family, are funding terrorism, subverting and corrupting the West, promoting Islamist propaganda, and committing human right abuses.
Help me free my beautiful country of these terrorists! 🇶🇦 pic.twitter.com/T2hF78zrsA
But the synergy between borderless, European socialism and Qatar’s radical Wahhabi Islamism runs deep.
The reason left liberals stand shoulder to shoulder with Islamist causes is that both ideologies create the same problems for themselves, which can be explained away with the same PR.
Both respect ideology more than nationhood, so they naturally collaborate to attack any society with a strong cultural identity. Both share a Tabula Rasa concept of humanity, resenting freedom of the individuals to express Petit Bourgeoisie or Haram political values. Both interpret justice through the lens of doctrine and revelation, so neither can accept equality under the law. Both are therefore incapable of building or sustaining societal contracts and wealth. Both are in denial about that fact and cover their failures by taking what free societies have built and pretending that they created it themselves. Finally, they both have to silence anybody who exposes the obvious failures of their ideologies. The natural enemy of both is the individualist, independent, thinker who does not wish the state to interfere with his life.
What is unusual about Qatar is that it has a lot of money (I shall avoid saying ‘wealth’ – their resource of natural gas was handed to them by the British along with their state in 1971) so, unlike other Islamist regimes, they can buy strategic influence in the West. I’m not just talking about celebrities and broadcasters like Tucker Carlson. Qatar, a radical Wahhabi State and among the most extreme Islamist societies on Earth, sees that socialist political movements are equipped with idealistic students, newspapers and think tanks – so they have become a generous benefactors of universities, media networks and think tanks – their proteges forming a united front against Israel.
Qatar also backs terrorist groups, colludes with the Muslim Brotherhood and houses Hamas operatives in Doha while securing exclusive reportage rights for Al Jazeera from the Gaza Strip. Al Jazeera’s Arabic language channel, which meets all the criteria under which RIA Novosti and Russia Today are banned, enjoys the same immunity in the EU as it appears to in the USA. That’s what expensive lobbying can do in democratic societies.
Recent events, however, threaten to break this uneasy Islamist-socialist alliance.
The 1979 revolution in Iran marked the first and only time an ancient, civilised and educated, country was totally subverted by radical Islam. When the Ayatollahs fall and the whole story of the long dark decades which followed is told in the West, it will strike a shattering blow to the marriage of convenience between the liberal left and Islamism.
I suspect that some more cynical Western political actors always knew this day was coming but just kept hoping that it wouldn’t arrive on their watch. Some are determined to ride the alliance into the ground and are now mobilising in full support of the Iranian Islamic regime which has killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in the last few months.
Spotted among a recent pro-Iranian regime march in London were Jeremy Corbyn – the former leader of the UK Labour Party – and Mothin Ali, the deputy leader of the Greens. Meanwhile Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York who appealed to Brooklyn LGBTQ liberals on a pro Palestine platform, has also expressed his disgust at the shaking of the Ayatollahs – as has the Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez who recently naturalised 800,000 illegals. When people complained that the foreigners bring crime to Spain, the far-left Más Madrid spokeswoman Tesh Sidi breezily retorted that they are no longer foreigners but now Spaniards.
Would these figures of the radical left ever apply their own logic to the new arrivals in Israel in 1947? No – obviously they couldn’t – which is to say that the union between those who are all giving of the shared Western inheritance and those who are all taking for Political Islam is now openly inconsistent with its own values.
The shaking of the Ayatollahs in Tehran will be an informative moment in the history of Western self-determination as well as Iran’s. As we saw with East European Communism, as we will see in Gender theory and much of the Net-Zero green agenda, an ideology truly collapses not because of its military defeat or political sabotage but because of its inability to justify its own excesses any further. A recent comment made by Qatar’s ex Prime Minister makes me realise how desperate the game is getting to keep the radical left and Islamists together.
‘As soon as we declare war on Iran, America will withdraw from the conflict, sell weapons to both sides and use our resources to defeat both sides and expand the Greater Israel Project.’
This level of paranoid insanity will always appeal to a few lunatics – but is surely too much, even for the socialist Eurocrats, academics and journalists who take Qatari cash bribes.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 02:00