Back
Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
🌐 DUTCH BANK ING SELLS DATA CENTER DEBTS. AMONG THEM A PIECE OF STARGATE
Dutch ING has put up for sale 12 loans to data centers totaling about 500 million dollars. One of them is linked to Stargate, an OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle project worth up to 500 billion. Bids are being accepted until 19 November.
Bloomberg reported this on 6 November, citing sources. The portfolio is being sold through competitive bidding, with a minimum bid of 10 million dollars. Inside are debts related to Vantage Data Centers and CyrusOne, and a 25 million position in an AI campus in New Mexico. This is Project Jupiter, which is associated with Oracle and Stargate.
To be honest up front: banks constantly sell loans and redistribute risk; it’s standard practice. The sale itself does not mean these loans are troubled. But look at the timing. The news came out the same day Nasdaq fell more than 5%, and shares of companies building AI data centers, like Applied Digital, Cipher Digital, and IREN, each lost more than 14%.
A month ago we wrote that investors would start asking: who will pay for all this infrastructure? Artificial intelligence is not an app on a phone. It’s land, electricity, chips, servers, cooling. And above all it’s huge debt. ING analysts in October estimated that big tech companies could spend nearly a trillion dollars on capital expenditures in fiscal year 2027. Data center operators are preparing to issue bonds of at least 60 billion euros in 2027 versus about 35 billion this year.
Now add what happened over the past week. The Democrats have taken Congress and are preparing laws on data centers, electricity bills, and independent AI testing. Valuations are falling, risks are rising, the payback for data centers is in question. Any competent financier in that situation will do the same: it’s better to transfer part of the risk to someone else while there’s a buyer.
We see a familiar pattern here. In 2008, mortgage loans were packaged into CDOs and synthetic CDOs and sold to each other until the risk ended up with someone who didn’t understand what they were buying. We’ve already said that the AI story could repeat the same mechanics, only instead of houses it would be data centers.
The main question now isn’t whether AI will change the world. The question is who will finance data centers if banks start cutting risk. The U.S. market in recent years has been sustained by AI. The sell-off has already begun, and what happens next is a big question. We will outline our scenario and next steps in a separate post.
💬A bank sells a loan not when everything is bad. It sells it when there’s still someone to sell it to.
💬 ABleaks_bot
💕 Join
Telegram publication
