ECB blog: AI-intensive euro area firms borrow through bonds, blunting rate hikes

Serguey Asael Shinder07 October 2026, 07:332 min read

An ECB Blog post published on 6 October looks at how euro area firms finance their artificial intelligence investments, and what that means for monetary policy.

The data. The authors classified euro area sectors by AI adoption, using survey data on firms' use of AI, and by AI development, using AI patent data. Between 2023 and 2025 the share of euro area firms using at least one form of AI more than doubled. Some sectors, such as media, telecommunications and IT services, both adopt and develop AI; others, such as legal and accounting, mainly adopt it.

How they fund it.

• Firms in the most AI-intensive sectors, particularly developers, are less leveraged than other sectors, relying more on equity.
• AI-intensive firms tend to be listed or backed by private equity such as venture capital.
• AI investment goes largely into intangible assets, software, data, algorithms and know-how, which are harder to pledge as loan collateral.
• When they do borrow, they have recently turned to market-based debt such as debt securities rather than bank loans, especially high AI adopters.

Two consequences for monetary policy, according to the post. Debt securities usually have longer maturities, so these firms' financing is less sensitive to interest rate hikes and more sensitive to the long end of the yield curve. And because they rely less on debt overall, their investment may respond less to the cash-flow channel when rates rise.

The gap with the US. Euro area AI patenting has grown over the past decade but trails the United States. In the authors' model, investment responds more strongly to positive AI news in the US than in the euro area, which they link to easier US access to venture capital, deeper equity markets and a larger unified market. They also note that euro area investors have been putting more money into US technology stocks and less into European tech firms, and conclude that completing the capital markets union would help AI-intensive firms find funding at each stage of growth.

The views are those of the authors, not necessarily of the ECB.