ING seeks buyers for $500 million in data center loans, including a Stargate stake

ING Groep is seeking buyers for about $500 million of loans tied to data center construction, an unusually concentrated sale that lands in the middle of a broader market reckoning over how the artificial-intelligence building boom is being financed. The Dutch bank is marketing a portfolio of 12 loans through a bids-wanted-in-competition auction, with offers of at least $10 million due November 19, according to reporting that began circulating late last week, which cited people familiar with the matter.

The package includes a $25 million slice of debt tied to a data center campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, that forms part of Project Jupiter, a site within the Stargate venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle. It also contains loans linked to data center operators Vantage Data Centers and CyrusOne, according to a breakdown of the auction that circulated among prospective bidders. An ING spokesperson declined to comment on the sale.

Lenders moving risk off their books

The sale fits a pattern banks have followed for much of this year: originate construction loans for data centers, then sell them down to private credit funds, asset managers and insurers chasing higher yields, a practice known on trading desks as lend-to-distribute. Earlier this year, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley were separately reported to be exploring private sales of data-center debt and significant risk transfers that shift part of their credit exposure to outside investors.

What is different about ING's sale, analysts said, is that it appears to be among the first auctions devoted exclusively to data center loans, rather than a mixed portfolio with the sector folded in alongside other commercial credit. Hank Calenti, a credit analyst at SMBC, said the move could simply reflect routine portfolio management or something more defensive.

This could be business as usual, or financiers looking to exit before the door shuts.

A selloff that has investors already nervous

The timing matters. The loan sale surfaced days after the Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5% on Thursday, its worst single session since April 2025, pushing the index into correction territory and erasing roughly $3 trillion of S&P 500 market value, as investors grew more skeptical that the torrent of capital spending on AI infrastructure would generate matching returns. Shares of data center and AI-infrastructure-adjacent companies were hit hard: Applied Digital, Cipher Mining and IREN each fell more than 14% that day. Pruksa Iamthongthong, a portfolio manager at Aberdeen Investments, said she expected the volatility to persist as the market assesses potential delays to U.S. data center construction.

Democratic gains in Tuesday's midterm elections added a political dimension to that uncertainty. Several states where Democrats made gains have floated moratoriums or tighter permitting rules on new data center construction, citing strain on local power grids and water supplies. Meta has told investors that political backlash following the midterms could make it harder to site new US facilities going forward, underscoring that the financing questions now surrounding ING's loan book are tangled up with real permitting risk, not just investor sentiment.

The contested project among the collateral

The clearest example of that permitting risk sits inside ING's own portfolio. The New Mexico campus backing the $25 million loan, publicly known as Project Jupiter, has spent much of 2026 tied up in regulatory and legal fights over an air-quality permit for an on-site natural-gas power system developer Acoma LLC wants to build to supply the site. New Mexico's Supreme Court stayed the permit proceedings and a related water-use authorization in late August after challenges from the environmental groups New Energy Economy and the Center for Biological Diversity, before unanimously rejecting those groups' broader challenges on September 17 and allowing the permitting process to resume; the New Mexico Environment Department's public notices for the project show the air-quality permit decision remains pending.

Oracle, the site's anchor tenant, sent developer Stack Infrastructure a force-majeure notice in September tied to the delays, a legal maneuver that can let a company defer certain contractual obligations without conceding the project is behind schedule. Oracle has said publicly that Project Jupiter remains on its planned schedule, even as the facility's targeted completion date slipped from August 2026 to February 2027 earlier this year, according to regional reporting on the dispute. The scale of what is riding on projects like it shows up in Oracle's own books: the company's quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the period ended August 31 reported interest expense of $1.428 billion, up 55% from $923 million a year earlier, on roughly $125.3 billion of senior notes and other long-term borrowings outstanding, alongside $28.5 billion in capital expenditures for the three months alone.

Who is watching the auction

The buyers ING is courting range from private credit shops and insurance companies to asset managers that have poured into data-center debt over the past two years, drawn by yields above what comparable corporate credit pays. For those investors, the sale is a test of how much appetite remains for AI-infrastructure debt at a moment when the equity side of the trade has wobbled. For rival banks, it is a signal worth watching: if ING's auction clears at a modest discount, more lenders may follow with sales of their own data-center exposure before, as Calenti put it, the door shuts. For Oracle, Vantage Data Centers, CyrusOne and the other borrowers whose debt is changing hands, the practical effect may be limited in the short term, since a loan sale typically does not change the terms borrowers owe, only who holds the paper and collects the interest.

Reporting on the sale, which has been attributed to Bloomberg by multiple outlets that have seen the marketing materials, has not disclosed any indicative pricing or the discount sellers might accept. Bids are due November 19, and the outcome, whether buyers show up in force or the portfolio struggles to clear, will be one of the more concrete early readings of whether Wall Street's private-credit arms still believe in the AI buildout at the prices banks are now asking.