This little auction matters more than everything the Nasdaq 100 lost the same day. Stocks trade every second, so everybody knows what Nvidia's worth at any moment. Private data center loans almost never get priced in public like this. And for 2 years, the whole AI boom has been funded on the assumption that this paper's safe. In 13 days, real buyers have to name a real price. ING is seeking offers on a dozen loans through a bids wanted in competition process, with bids due November 19 and a $10 million minimum. The pile includes debt tied to Vantage Data Centers and CyrusOne. And it includes a $25 million piece tied to the New Mexico site in Stargate, the venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle. Bloomberg calls this a rare auction of only data center debt. No price has been reported, and ING declined to comment. $25 million is pocket change on a campus reported at $165 billion, and I won't pretend otherwise. But just look at which campus it is: Oracle sent a force majeure notice to the developer of that site in September. That's the legal notice saying events beyond a company's control may excuse it from its obligations. Oracle says the schedule hasn't changed, and it calls these notices commonplace on projects this size. New Mexico regulators have until November 23 to decide the air permit for the site's power plant. That's 4 days AFTER the bids are due. The FT has already reported the project's roughly $18 billion construction loan trading at stressed levels. So anybody bidding on that slice is putting a price on a permit nobody has yet. And ING isn't alone: Startup Fortune, citing Bloomberg, says JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, SMBC and MUFG have been shopping pieces of AI debt they helped underwrite. Andrzej Skiba of RBC's BlueBay unit told Bloomberg he's seeing a "massive hedge fund capitulation" in the space. CoreWeave's 9.625% notes due 2032 last traded around 76 cents on the dollar, for a yield of about 16%. The cost of insuring CoreWeave's debt was reported around 1,164 basis points this week, close to its October record. SoftBank's shares fell more than 9% in Tokyo on Friday, and its default insurance hit a 4-year high. Meanwhile Apple went out for about $7 billion of bonds this week and drew about $31 billion of orders. That's the tell for me, because lenders still have plenty of money. They're just getting pickier about AI paper. And the AI trade has needed the opposite. The money behind these campuses has to keep rolling from one lender to the next, and that only works if someone's always willing to take the paper at a good price. If the next buyer wants a big discount, the bank thinks twice about the next loan. Then the next campus costs more to finance, and eventually somebody's forecast for 2028 falls apart. Now, a smart person would say I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. $500 million is a rounding error in a market this big. Banks sell loans every day to manage their books. ING may have decided this months ago for reasons that have nothing to do with AI. Investment grade credit held up fine on Thursday, with LQD up 0.15%. And Oracle reportedly can't terminate the New Mexico lease, which should comfort the lenders. If ING gets close to full price, I'm wrong and the panic was overdone. But I think that's the point of watching this, and I'd bet the result leaks. CoreWeave reports November 10. Nvidia reports November 17. Then the ING bids land on November 19. I'd pay more attention to the third one. So who wins this one: ING getting close to full price for those Stargate loans, or a buyer demanding a serious discount?