For eighteen months, the central mystery of AI credit has been this: banks have been carrying data-center construction loans at par, with no open market to tell anyone whether that valuation is real. ING just changed that.
ING is looking to offload around $500 million in data-center loans all at once, with a dozen positions available via a bids-wanted-in-competition process, with bids due November 19, 2026. The auction is unusual at that scale for being so concentrated in data-center debt. Whatever clears on November 19 will be among the more honest price signals the sector has produced.
Why the Oracle Slice Matters Most
The auction includes a $25 million piece linked to the Stargate project in New Mexico, which involves OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, as well as loan assets involving Vantage Data Centers and CyrusOne. Twenty-five million dollars is a rounding error relative to the full portfolio. Its symbolic weight is not.
Oracle sent a force majeure notice to a Blue Owl Capital unit tied to Project Jupiter, seeking contractual protection if the campus fails to come online in 2028 as planned. About $18 billion of loans tied to the Oracle-leased New Mexico campus have been quoted around 89 to 91 cents on the dollar, according to reporting that cited pricing circulated by syndicate desks. ING’s $25 million slice becomes an early Stargate-linked debt position to face an open price test. That is a data point every other lender in the building will be watching.
The $38 Billion Problem Sitting Behind It
The ING auction does not exist in isolation. A bank group led by JPMorgan and MUFG has spent months trying to syndicate a record $38 billion construction loan tied to data centers in Texas and Wisconsin, built by Vantage Data Centers and leased to Oracle as part of its Stargate commitment with OpenAI. Some lenders have indicated they would consider selling pieces of that exposure at a discount to reduce balance-sheet usage.
The two situations are related. If ING’s $500 million clears at a meaningful discount, it establishes a comparable for the Texas and Wisconsin paper. Banks sitting on pieces of that $38 billion will face immediate questions from their own risk committees.
What the Credit Markets Are Already Saying
Bond investors are not waiting for the auction. CoreWeave’s 2032 bond yield has been trading in the mid-teens, and five-year credit default swaps have been cited as spiking above 1,289 basis points in recent market commentary. Credit is differentiating fast between hyperscalers with deep balance sheets and project-finance borrowers whose cash flow depends entirely on leases holding.
The divergence between AI credit spreads and broader investment-grade benchmarks has been building for months. AI-related bonds have been pricing at a material premium to the broad corporate index, a gap that widens every time project-finance stress surfaces.
Jefferies global head of equity strategy Christopher Wood wrote in his Greed and Fear report: “the credit card will be taken away.” That is still a tail risk. What is not a tail risk is that the cost of the next dollar of AI construction debt just went up regardless of what ING’s auction shows.
Stocks to Watch
Oracle (ORCL) sits at the center of every thread here: tenant of Project Jupiter and the company whose force majeure notice helped surface stress already visible in secondary markets. Any sustained widening in its perceived credit risk changes the conversation about its lease-heavy buildout.
Blue Owl Capital (OWL) is tied to Project Jupiter through its ownership of STACK Infrastructure. Oracle shares fell about 3% on September 24, 2026, on reports of the force majeure notice, and Blue Owl traded down roughly 4% in some market reports that day. If the New Mexico debt clears well below par, Blue Owl’s marks on remaining exposure face scrutiny.
CoreWeave is the market’s clearest read on neocloud credit stress. A 9.625% coupon bond due 2032 has been quoted around a mid-teens yield to maturity in recent trading, and any new unsecured debt would likely have to clear near where the secondary market is trading. Every basis point that widens after November 19 compounds that problem.
Blackstone (BX) is the quiet variable. The firm has been among the most aggressive buyers of private data-center credit. A below-par clearing in ING’s auction either creates a buying opportunity at prices Blackstone’s credit funds can absorb, or it validates concerns the firm’s own marks are too generous. Either way, its next earnings call will face the question directly.
Private credit’s mark-to-model convention is precisely what an open auction threatens to disrupt. Moody’s has flagged how payment-in-kind amendments and maturity extensions can mask the true default rate inside private debt portfolios.
The November 19, 2026 bid deadline will not resolve the debate about whether AI infrastructure spending is sustainable. It will, for the first time, give credit investors an observable number instead of a bank’s internal assumption. That alone makes it one of the most consequential data points in AI debt since the Oracle force majeure notice landed on September 24, 2026.
