Less than one month after Alphabet Inc. GOOGL-Q broke the record for largest Canadian dollar-denominated corporate bond offering in history, Google’s parent company has already been bested by e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc AMZN-Q.
Amazon is selling $14-billion worth of maple bonds, the term for loonie-denominated bonds issued by foreign companies, broken into five pieces with maturities ranging from three to 30 years.
The issuance is nearly two-thirds larger than the $8.5-billion, four-part offering sold by Alphabet in mid-May and nearly double the $7.15-billion bond deal raised by Coastal GasLink in 2024, which remains the largest corporate bond ever issued by a Canadian company.
Both the Amazon and Alphabet deals represent a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars being borrowed from investors around the world by various global cloud-computing companies as they dramatically scale up their artificial-intelligence capabilities.
Canada’s maple market was already booming before the hyperscalers arrived, driven in large part by a little-noticed technical change that took place in early 2025. That was when newly issued maples started getting included in the FTSE Canada Universe Bond Index.
The change gave maple issuers access to a much larger pool of investors, including the droves that own index-tracking funds.
The Alphabet deal pushed the total amount of maple bonds issued in 2026 to $19.8-billion, according to Royal Bank of Canada data, setting a new annual record that surpassed the deal-making frenzy of 2021, when the maple market hit $19.2-billion. Not including any other maple deals that have been announced since May 7, the Amazon offering pushes the 2026 total to at least $33.8-billion.
This means the current maple market is already worth nearly one-third of last year’s domestic corporate bond market, and the year isn’t halfway over. Canadian businesses issued a total of approximately $100-billion worth of corporate bonds in 2025, which was the highest amount of corporate debt issuance the country had seen in more than a decade.
Investors remain ravenous for maple deals, with a total of $28-billion worth of orders placed for the Amazon offering, according to a source familiar with the matter. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source as they are not authorized to disclose confidential transaction details.
RBC, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are leading the Amazon offering.
The 30-year portion of the Amazon offering is the largest, totalling $4.75-billion. Other pieces include a $3.5-billion 10-year bond, a $2.5-billion five-year bond, a $2-billion seven-year bond and a $1.25-billion three-year bond.
The yield on the 30-year part is also the highest, expected to be 1.1 per cent above government bond yields. The other pieces are expected to yield between 0.4 per cent and 0.8 per cent above government yields.
Corporate bonds generally offer investors higher yields – a term used to measure financial returns – than government bonds, as they are considered higher risk.
Several other large American companies have tapped the maple market in recent months, as currency exchange and interest rates favour borrowing from Canadian investors. Goldman Sachs sold $2.75-billion worth of maple bonds in February, AT&T did a $2.25-billion maple deal in March and New York Life did a $1.1-billion maple deal in late April, just to name a few notable examples.