DayOne Weighs Slashing Its IPO in Half as Data-Center Jitters Spread

DayOne Data Centers filed in early October to raise as much as $5 billion on Nasdaq under the ticker DODC, positioning itself as one of the biggest AI infrastructure listings of the year. Three weeks later, people familiar with the matter tell Bloomberg the Singapore-based operator is weighing whether to cut that target roughly in half, to somewhere between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, or push the whole offering past the November 3 U.S. midterm elections. Nothing has been finalized, and DayOne has declined to comment.

DayOne Isn't the Only One Stalling

The retreat lines up with a broader stall in data-center listings that Reuters documented in detail before DayOne's wobble became public. SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer whose flagship Ohio facility is tied almost entirely to OpenAI's lease commitments, postponed formally marketing its own IPO to field further SEC questions about a reported $60 billion valuation target. Switch has filed confidentially and was expected to launch its roadshow only after DayOne cleared the market first, according to Reuters' sourcing -- a sequencing that now looks shakier. Vantage Data Centres and CyrusOne are each exploring offerings of their own, meaning the entire cohort is effectively waiting to see who blinks first.

The dividing line is whether demand is contracted and already energised, or only planned. The earlier the better -- uncertainty is what hurts data-centre models.

That assessment, from Shenton Research's Ke Yan, cuts to why DayOne specifically is being treated as a bellwether rather than a one-off. Unlike SB Energy, which Reuters notes leans heavily on a single AI customer, DayOne's pitch has rested on diversification: live, revenue-generating facilities spread across Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, Finland and Spain, backed by about 2.1 to 2.3 gigawatts of customer bookings and investors including SoftBank Vision Fund, Coatue Management, Hillhouse and Citadel's Ken Griffin. Its own filings show why the growth story still needs selling: revenue roughly tripled to $512 million in the first half of 2026 from $151.5 million a year earlier, but its net loss widened more than sixfold, to $77.2 million from $12.6 million, as it keeps building ahead of demand.

A Regional Selloff Set the Backdrop

The timing is not incidental. On October 15, South Korea's KOSPI and KOSDAQ indexes each fell more than 8% intraday, tripping circuit breakers on both exchanges after a hotter-than-expected U.S. inflation print reignited doubts about whether AI infrastructure spending is generating enough revenue to justify its cost -- a selloff in U.S. AI and chip stocks that spilled directly into Asian markets. Days later, ElliceGroup, a Korean neocloud operator planning to pour roughly 201 billion won of IPO proceeds into AI data centers and GPUs, priced its KOSDAQ listing at the top of its range anyway, even as reports characterized its subsequent trading as rocky -- a sign that pricing power and aftermarket performance are no longer moving together the way they were through most of 2026.

Bloomberg Intelligence's Stephen Yin has argued DayOne should take the hint and downsize deliberately rather than get forced into it, telling clients the company should aim for the $2.5-3 billion range and price at a discount steep enough to keep its order book stable rather than defend a valuation the market is no longer willing to underwrite in full.

What It Means for Investors

None of this suggests capital is fleeing AI infrastructure outright -- DayOne has still closed roughly half of a $7 billion-equivalent loan package and continues separate talks with banks over a $500 million bond, according to earlier Bloomberg reporting, so lenders remain willing where cash flow is contracted and operating. What's changing is the premium equity investors will pay for growth that is merely projected rather than booked. CBRE's Neil Bear-Hetherington has framed the emerging test bluntly: developers need creditworthy, contracted revenue to service the debt load their AI-ready facilities carry, and the market is now pricing that distinction explicitly rather than taking scale as a proxy for it. For an IPO pipeline that assumed 2026's AI infrastructure boom would simply keep lifting every offering, DayOne's hedging is the clearest signal yet that the easy window has closed, at least until investors can see past the next few data points.