ING Is Getting Cold Feet on the AI Boom Srividya Kalyanaraman Mon, November 9, 2026 at 1:49 PM EST 3 min read ING +4.12% NVDA -5.32% OPAI.PVT AI +2.10% 9984.T -4.20% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
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Dutch bank ING is offloading about $500 million tied to data center projects in the U.S. This includes the much-hyped Stargate AI venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle.
Maybe one day in the future this would seem like an impulse sell. But as it stands today, the cost of such an undertaking is enormous, AI companies are spending more money than they're making, and there will be increased political opposition. So ING wants out.
The transaction does not necessarily mean that the loans are distressed or that ING is expecting borrowers to default. Banks regularly sell loan portfolios to manage exposure and free up capital. So the sale might not be significant, but the signal is strong. This is a tacit admission that investors are beginning to question whether the expected returns from AI will justify the extraordinary borrowing costs.
ING is seeking bids on 12 loans, with offers due by November 19 and a minimum bid size of $10 million. The portfolio includes a $25 million loan connected to a large data center development in New Mexico, part of Stargate. Also included is debt linked to data center operators Vantage Data Centers and CyrusOne.
The $500 billion Stargate initiative was announced in January 2025 as a major effort to expand U.S. AI infrastructure. OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle are among its principal backers. However, these projects involve enormous upfront expenditure, often before facilities are even operational, let alone generating meaningful revenue.
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Until recently, much of this investment was financed by large technology companies using their substantial cash flows. But the scale of expansion is pushing developers and smaller cloud-computing providers towards debt markets. And data center operators often rely on long-term contracts with big tech companies to justify construction.
Now also seems like a reasonable time to sell with the expected political backlash from the newly elected Democratic Senate. In Texas, a Democratic governor-elect has called for an immediate moratorium on new data center construction. U.S. technology stocks have experienced a sharp sell-off. The Nasdaq 100 fell approximately 6.4% on Thursday, wiping out around $2.3 trillion in market value. Data center operators Applied Digital, Cipher Digital and IREN were among the hardest hit.
The November 19 bidding deadline will offer an important indication of investor appetite for data center debt. Demand for more computing power is here to stay, and Big Tech isn't abandoning its AI ambitions. But the financing model has to change and there needs to be investor confidence that the returns will be commensurate and in the near future.
