A data-center developer sold a bond on Thursday that comes due in the year 2626. Gridlock Meadows Holdings, which builds server farms for AI companies, priced the six-hundred-year note at 6.66 percent. Nobody in the room laughed. (Nobody laughed in 1929 either, at first.)
The logic is simple, in the way a cliff is simple. Treasury yields have jumped, so borrowing for the AI buildout now costs more. Gridlock's answer was to borrow once, for six centuries, and never face a refinancing again. Duration risk, meaning how badly a bond gets hurt when rates move, is now measured in dynasties.
Buyers lined up. Six pension funds took the whole deal in under an hour, which is roughly how fast subprime desks filled orders in 2006. The first coupon is due next spring. The last one is owed to people whose great-grandparents have not been born.
"We are levered long on the future," said a Gridlock spokesperson, using a phrase that means owing money on a bet. "The chips will pay for themselves. Eventually. We have defined eventually as 2626."
