Stack Seeks $6 Billion Melbourne Loan as AI Debt Faces Scrutiny

Stack Infrastructure is seeking a five-year $6 billion loan for a Melbourne data center, testing lender appetite as borrowing tied to artificial intelligence faces scrutiny.

The Blue Owl Capital-owned operator has named banks to arrange, underwrite and manage the proposed borrowing. The loan would fund a data center project in Melbourne, but the proposal does not identify which campus would receive the proceeds. Stack’s Melbourne sites include MEL01, a 180-megawatt campus with four data centers in Truganina, and MEL02, listed at 252 megawatts.

The proposed financing is about 6.6 times the size of a green facility Stack closed in July 2025 to fund the next phase of MEL01 in West Melbourne. Deutsche Bank, MUFG Bank, Natixis, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation and Société Générale fully underwrote that earlier facility.

Market pressure is also visible in the debt of CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider. On Oct. 14, CoreWeave’s unsecured bonds maturing in 2032 traded for less than 80 cents per dollar and yielded more than 15%. Those figures reflect secondary-market trading in CoreWeave debt and do not describe the terms of Stack’s proposed loan.

Nearly $500 billion of AI-related debt had been issued globally so far in 2026 as of Aug. 3. Hyperscalers, the largest cloud companies, accounted for 40% of that issuance. The new Melbourne financing remains proposed and has not closed.