Data Centre Stocks Suddenly Plunge in Unison: Here’s Why
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia — A wave of selling hit US-listed technology companies focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and burdened with mounting debt. Fears of a potential rise in benchmark interest rates intensified, raising concerns about the high cost of financing the expansion of mega-scale data-centre and global AI infrastructure projects.
Reuters reported that shares in data-centre infrastructure developers and providers were among the hardest hit in Wednesday’s market sell-off (14 October, local time).
Data-centre operators battered by heavy selling
Data-centre providers, the backbone of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, suffered the steepest declines. Investors sold shares amid the prospect of rising borrowing costs. The following figures were reported by Reuters on Thursday (15 October 2026):
Applied Digital (APLD.O), a leading data-centre infrastructure operator, plunged by as much as 8.8%.
IREN (IREN.O), a data-centre and high-performance computing provider, fell 9.9%.
Nebius (NBIS.O), a neocloud computing services company, sank 15.1%. It was projected to have lost nearly 20% of its value so far this month.
CoreWeave (CRWV.O), a major neocloud data-centre company, dropped 9.5%, putting it on course to shed about a quarter of its market value in just one month.
Oracle (ORCL.N), a hyperscaler aggressively expanding its global data-centre network while carrying substantial debt, fell 7.2%. Most of the company’s dollar-denominated bonds also weakened.
Interest rates and AI financing risks
Selling pressure on data-centre shares followed a rise in US Treasury yields after the release of hotter-than-expected consumer price index (CPI) data. The 10-year Treasury yield rose by 3.6 basis points, while the two-year yield jumped 7.2 basis points. This strengthened expectations of further interest-rate rises by the Federal Reserve.
Higher rates directly affect data-centre companies that rely heavily on debt to fund physical facilities, server racks and purchases of AI chips.
“Investors are beginning to question whether the massive expansion of AI and the build-out of data centres will deliver the returns they expect,” said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, according to Reuters.
The impact of tighter financing conditions also spread to data-centre server equipment suppliers. Dell (DELL.N) and HPE (HPE.N) shares fell 10.3% and 6.4%, respectively, after Barclays cut its ratings on both stocks from “overweight” to “equal-weight”.
Barclays said hardware valuations had run too far ahead of any clear inflection in the monetisation of the AI ecosystem.
According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, the cost of insuring debt against default risk, measured by credit default swaps (CDS), for several companies that own data-centre networks, including Oracle and CoreWeave, has risen to record highs.