Record-Breaking Maple Bond Sale: How Alphabet is Leveraging Canadian Debt for AI
The full-scale invasion of Canada, by foreign corporations flooding into our debt market, is well under way.
Google parent Alphabet Inc. GOOGL brought out the heaviest ordnance yet last week, raising $8.5-billion by selling a four-part bond with maturity dates ranging from five to 30 years. It was not only the largest maple bond the market has ever seen – maples being the term for non-Canadian companies issuing loonie-denominated bonds – but also the largest corporate bond ever issued in the country’s history, edging out the $7.15-billion raised by Coastal GasLink in 2024 by more than $1-billion dollars.
Maple bonds have been booming in Canada, contributing to a broader corporate borrowing binge that has been going on for years. The Alphabet deal follows several other multibillion-dollar maples in recent months, including a $2.75-billion deal from Goldman Sachs GS-N in February and a $2.25-billion offering from AT&T T-N in March.
The maple market was already on track to have a record-breaking year in 2026, but that feat has been achieved by early May after accounting for the Alphabet transaction. Foreign issuers are attracted to Canada’s comparatively lower interest rates and favourable currency exchange rates, but a critical factor is a surge in investor demand sparked by a little-noticed change that happened 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.
Adding maples to the main Canadian bond index was “pivotal” to the market’s recent upswing, said Rob Brown, co-head of Canadian debt capital markets at Royal Bank of Canada, which was the joint active bookrunner for the Alphabet deal.
“It deepened the investor base, improved secondary-market liquidity, and in many cases, translated directly into better new-issue pricing for borrowers,” Mr. Brown said.
Most Canadians are likely unaware of the change that opened the maple market floodgates, but Mr. Brown said the gains will nonetheless flow to many of them.
“We have to remind ourselves that these end investors, they are institutions, but they are investing on behalf of Canadians,” he said. “They are life insurance companies, mutual funds, investment counsellors and pension funds.”
“Giving them an opportunity to invest in a fixed income product denominated in Canadian dollars from issuers based outside of Canada that are typically in sectors that are underrepresented in Canada, like the tech sector, health care and others, is clearly a benefit to our market here,” Mr. Brown said.
FTSE Russell, a division of the London Stock Exchange Group that manages the Canadian bond index along with others around the world, first launched a consultation on the change more than two years ago, in April, 2024. At that point, according to the consultation document, Canada’s index was unique in its exclusion of bonds issued by non-domestic issuers.
Neither the FTSE US Broad Investment-Grade Bond Index, nor the FTSE Euro Broad Investment-Grade Bond Index include screening criteria for an issuer country. The document said Canada’s exclusion dates back to the early 2000s “when there were explicit foreign content limits that applied to Canadian pension plans and Registered Retirement Savings Plans.”
Marina Mets, head of fixed income and convertibles in the Americas at FTSE Russell, said at least one other consultation on adding maples was conducted prior to 2024, though no change occurred. Eventually, the maple market grew to the point at which FTSE decided another look was warranted.
“Indices are living, breathing things,” Ms. Mets said in an interview. “They are meant to evolve with the market they represent and they are meant to provide a kind of balance for investors and the market at large.”
As the maple market grew, the index started to lose some of that balance. In 2024, for example, Canadian companies issued $94.5-billion in corporate bonds, according to LSEG Data & Analytics. But the $8.8-billion worth of maple bonds that were issued that year, according to RBC data, were not included in that total.
In 2025, after the index change took effect, the maple market nearly doubled to $15.8-billion worth of loonie-denominated bonds issued by foreign companies, the RBC data showed. That made last year second only to the deal-making frenzy of 2021, when the maple market hit $19.2-billion.
This year was already on track to surpass the 2021 peak even before the Alphabet deal was announced, with RBC tracking $10.2-billion worth of maple transactions between January 1 and April 23. Adding the Alphabet deal and a $1.1-billion offering from New York Life on April 30 pushes the 2026 total as of May 7 to $19.8-billion; already a record year and it isn’t even halfway over.
The type of maple issuers is also diversifying rapidly, as the market evolves beyond a niche previously dominated by banks to attract businesses operating across a range of sectors.
New foreign non-bank issuers that have tapped Canadian debt markets since the start of 2025 include Texas-based energy distributor Oncor, life insurance provider Corebridge Financial Inc. and Maryland-based SmartStop Self Storage REIT Inc.
“For financial institutions, their raw material is access to capital, access to funding, and they are constantly looking for alternatives and need to be looking around the globe,” said Patrick MacDonald, who heads the Canadian debt capital markets team at RBC alongside Mr. Brown. “What we are finding now is the corporate issuers are now having added confidence when they look at the Canadian market.”
“It is a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways, the more issuers we see come to the market and the more deals get done, the more attention it is going to attract and I think it will continue to feed the momentum for others,” Mr. MacDonald said.
But compelling currency exchange and interest rates are also major drivers of that momentum. If the Canadian dollar soars or interest rates in other markets fall, there is every reason to believe maples will move elsewhere.
“When the cost advantage disappears then the issuances will drop off,” Rosalind Hunter, co-chair of the capital markets practice at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, said in an interview. “It is really while issuers can get an all-in funding cost that is less than what they might get in another market that we will continue to see it. It is a very cyclical type of issuance that will fall away when those global market factors change.”
Global market factors are in constant flux, but whenever they do favour Canada, allowing maples into the country’s flagship bond index has made it possible for Alphabet to bring its megadeal here. And that is exactly the sort of outcome Ms. Mets was hoping to achieve.
“From a pure index lens, investor lens and product diversification lens, this was an incredible achievement for Canadian capital markets,” she said. “And if the index supported that then of course that is the goal.”
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
