ING Puts About $500 Million of Data Centre Loans Up for Sale, Including Stargate Debt

The Dutch lender is running the sale as a bids-wanted-in-competition auction covering about a dozen loans. Bids are due on November 19, and each must be for at least $10 million, according to the Bloomberg report. ING declined to comment when contacted by Reuters, and neither report gave a reason for the sale.

The auction matters because it will put a price on data centre debt at a moment when investors are reassessing the whole AI build-out. Bloomberg described a sale made up entirely of data centre loans as rare. The prices buyers offer on November 19 will show how much of a discount the market now wants to take on loans that until recently banks were competing to make.

The portfolio includes a $25 million loan linked to a large data centre in New Mexico that forms part of Stargate, the AI infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank Group and Oracle. Bloomberg reported that Oracle has invoked force majeure at that site. The package also contains debt tied to Vantage Data Centers and CyrusOne, two of the larger operators in the sector.

The sale comes after a week in which the outlook for US data centre construction darkened. Democrats made sweeping gains in the US midterm elections, raising expectations of tougher rules on technology companies and on the facilities that power AI. In Texas, one of the largest markets for new computing capacity, governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has called for data centre construction to pause until lawmakers act.

Investors moved fast. The Nasdaq 100 fell 6.4% on Thursday, wiping out about $2.3 trillion in value, according to Bloomberg, while Reuters said companies in the S&P 500 lost roughly $3 trillion in market value. Shares in data centre operators Applied Digital, Cipher Digital and IREN each dropped by more than 14%, Reuters reported.

The selling also reached credit. Bloomberg reported that high-yield bonds issued by data centre-linked companies including CoreWeave and Galaxy Digital fell, and that some analysts worry credit markets are nearing the limit of how much AI-related debt they can absorb. Goldman Sachs and Apollo are separately trying to syndicate parts of a record chip financing tied to SpaceX, the report said.

A bank selling a block of loans does not on its own signal that the borrowers are in trouble. Lenders routinely sell down exposure to free up capital or manage concentration in a single sector, and the reports did not suggest any of the loans in ING's package are impaired. But the timing means the result will be read closely by other banks that have lent heavily to the sector, and by the private credit funds that have become some of the biggest financiers of AI data centres.

The auction closes on November 19, the deadline for bids on the dozen loans.