The numbers behind the AI boom have gotten so large they’re almost numbing: a trillion here, a hundred billion there. But this week offered a useful reminder that even gold rushes eventually run into gravity.
DayOne, a Singapore-based data center operator serving cloud and AI clients, is pushing ahead with plans to go public as early as November, according to people familiar with the matter. It aims to file publicly with US regulators in mid-October, targeting a raise of up to $5 billion at a roughly $20 billion valuation. The company, backed by Coatue and Hillhouse, closed a $4.5 billion Series C round in June and has already locked in about 2.1 gigawatts of capacity across Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, Finland and Spain.
That timeline matters because DayOne isn’t moving in a vacuum. Just days earlier, SoftBank-backed SB Energy postponed the formal marketing of its own IPO—one that had been targeting a roughly $60 billion valuation—while it works through additional questions from US regulators. Investors, sources say, are also uneasy about SB Energy’s heavy reliance on a single customer: OpenAI. Separately, a brewing dispute involving Oracle and Blue Owl threatens to delay a data center project in New Mexico. Put together, it’s the clearest sign yet that the market for AI infrastructure bets is maturing — fast.
The distinction investors are now drawing is straightforward but consequential: is a company’s demand already under contract and powered up, or merely projected? As one analyst put it, the dividing line runs between capacity that’s secured and generating revenue versus capacity that exists mostly on paper. With electricity supply now the binding constraint on the entire industry, the operators winning favor are the ones with power already locked in, a meaningful share of capacity live or nearly finished, and long-term take-or-pay contracts that guarantee cash flow regardless of how the AI narrative evolves.
A pipeline getting crowded and pickier
DayOne isn’t alone in the queue. Switch has filed confidentially and is expected to launch its own offering right after DayOne’s. Vantage Data Centers is reportedly weighing an IPO or sale at a valuation near $100 billion—which would make it the largest data center listing ever. CyrusOne is eyeing 2027. Add Brookfield’s Csquare and various Stargate-linked ventures, and you get a genuine wave of infrastructure companies racing toward public markets at the same moment scrutiny is intensifying.
That’s the real story here: the AI boom’s “picks and shovels” layer—the data centers, power deals, and cooling systems rather than the models themselves—has quietly become one of the largest asset classes tied to artificial intelligence. But size is now cutting both ways. Moody’s projects the six biggest US tech firms will spend close to $1 trillion on AI infrastructure by 2027, and higher interest rates make debt-financed buildouts—the model most of these companies rely on—considerably more expensive to sustain while waiting years for payback. For lenders and IPO investors alike, the creditworthiness of the customer at the other end of a contract now matters as much as the physical infrastructure itself.
That’s precisely what’s tripping up SB Energy: its fortunes are tightly bound to OpenAI, whose own financial arrangements—including a $105 billion lease guarantee from Nvidia and a fresh $1.5 billion Nvidia investment in SB Energy—illustrate how tangled and circular the financing behind “AI infrastructure” has become. When the customer, the chipmaker, and the financier start overlapping this heavily, investors understandably want more clarity before writing a check.
The takeaway isn’t that the data center boom is over—demand for AI compute isn’t slowing down. It’s that the easy money phase is ending, and companies that can prove their revenue rather than promise it are the ones moving toward the finish line first.