Faced with the unprecedented financing requirements of AI, major banks find themselves torn between the necessity of participating in the sector and the fear of overexposure. According to the FT, the current trend is leaning toward risk reduction.
Major U.S. institutions, including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, as well as non-U.S. players like Sumitomo Mitsui, are attempting to redistribute a portion of data center-related debt to other investors. According to the FT, they are exploring private sales or risk transfers to free up capital. The scale of the financing is unprecedented: Oracle and CoreWeave have borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars to fund their infrastructure, putting bank balance sheets under strain.
significant risk transfer
Certain transactions illustrate this pressure. JPMorgan and MUFG are looking to distribute 38 billion dollars in debt linked to an Oracle project in the United States, sometimes at a discount. In parallel, banks are developing 'significant risk transfer' structures, already common in Europe, to offload the riskiest tranches of highly concentrated loans while retaining a portion of the exposure, the FT notes.
However, these assets remain risky due to sector concentration, construction hazards, and growing local opposition to certain projects. In this context, banks are diversifying funding sources, from private credit to bonds, and are seeking more counterparties to absorb volumes that are expected to rise further, the British newspaper highlights.
BNP Paribas is France's largest banking group. Net banking product (NBP) breaks down by activity as follows:
- retail banking (50.8%): retail banking activity in France (24.2% of NBP), in Belgium (14%), and Italy (10.1%). The remainder of the NBP (51.7%) is from international activities and specialized financial services activities (consumer loans, real estate credit, leasing credit, car fleet management, computer equipment leasing);
- finance and investment banking (36.1%): consulting and capital market activities (83.2% of NBP; merger-acquisition consulting, activities related to the stock, interest, and exchange markets, etc.) and financing (16.8%; financing for acquisitions, projects, raw material transactions, etc.);
- institutional and private management and insurance (13.1%): asset management, private banking activity (No. 1 in France), real estate and on-line brokerage services, insurance and securities services (No. 1 in Europe for retained securities).
At the end of 2025, BNP Paribas was managing EUR 1,075.6 billion in current deposits and EUR 897.3 billion in current loans.
Net banking product is distributed geographically as follows: Europe/Middle East/Africa (80.8%), America (10.8%) and Asia/Pacific (8.4%).
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