Capital · United States

ING puts $500 million of data center loans up for sale

Credited to The Economic Times · economictimes.indiatimes.com · 19h ago

This includes a $25 million loan tied to a large New Mexico data center that forms part of the Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank Group and Oracle, the report said.

Dutch lender ING is putting up for sale about $500 million portfolio of data center loans all at once, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The bank is taking bids for a dozen loans through a so-called bids-wanted-in-competition process, according to the report.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report. ING did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside business hours.

This comes after a broader selloff that hit chipmakers and so-called neocloud companies, particularly hard as Democrats' sweeping victory in the US midterms fanned fears of tougher regulation of the technology.

The portfolio also includes debt linked to data center operators such as Vantage Data Centers and CyrusOne, Bloomberg said, adding that the bids are due on November 19 for at least $10 million in size.

The selloff evaporated $3 trillion in stock market value from S&P 500 companies. Data center operators Applied Digital, Cipher Digital and IREN tumbled more than 14% each.

Models & LabsUnited States

Thinking Machines debuts Inkling 2 Small amid reported $5B fundraising push

Credited to SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com2h ago

Useful

Thinking Machines Labs Inc. has released a new large language model that can automate artificial intelligence training tasks.

The algorithm, Inkling 2 Small, made its debut late Thursday. Around the same time, Business Insider reported that Thinking Machine is in the process of raising a $5 billion funding round led by Accel. The company, which was founded last year by former OpenAI Group PBC Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, is expected to receive a $40 billion valuation.

Thinking Machines trained Inkling 2 Small on a cluster of GB300 NVL72 racks. Each system contains 72 Blackwell Ultra graphics cards and half as many central processing units. The company completed the initial pre-training phase in 68 hours and subsequently refined the model through a nine-day reinforcement learning workflow. There were also a number of intermediate training steps.

Thinking Machines honed Inkling 2 Small’s programming capabilities by giving it hundreds of thousands of long-horizon coding challenges. The task collection included a number of particularly complicated “autoresearch” exercises. They required the model to post-train neural networks, optimize LLM components called kernels and perform other AI research work.

Thinking Machines put Inkling 2 Small’s machine learning skills to the test by asking it to fine-tune Qwen3.5-4B. The goal was to improve the open-source LLM’s ability to make predictions such as weather forecasts. According to the company, Inking 2 Small doubled the model’s forecasting score in 4.5 hours.

The LLM is also adapt at automating business tasks. It outperformed Spark Open, Kimi K3 and several other open-source models on three popular knowledge work benchmarks. Additionally, it earned higher scores across several financial task datasets.

Inkling 2 Small includes a vision encoder that can analyze images. Moreover, it enables the LLM to visually verify the quality of the graphics that it generates. If a user asks the model to create an e-commerce store, it can not only check the website’s code for bugs but also visually inspect product pages to check that they render correctly.

The vision encoder accounts for 292 million of Inking 2 Small’s 594 billion parameters. About 17 billion of those parameters activate when a user enters a prompt. Inking 2 Small can adjust the amount of computing power that it spends on tasks, which enables developers to trade off output quality for increased cost-efficiency or vice versa.

Particularly savvy users can extend the model’s capabilities by post-training, or customizing it, using their own data. Thinking Machines says that Inkling 2 Small learns faster than its earlier models. That should translate into more cost-efficient post-training runs.

Inkling 2 Small is available via Thinking Machines’ Tinker cloud service on launch. The company plans to release the model’s weights under an open-source license next week.

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Capital · United States

TeraWulf's Muskie expansion to 1 GW comes with $756m in security for Kentucky Power

Credited to Rackline · Claire Fontaine · investors.terawulf.com · 8h ago

TeraWulf's plan to double the power at its Muskie Data Campus in eastern Kentucky puts much of the risk of the expansion on TeraWulf rather than on the utility's other customers. Alongside the extra capacity, TeraWulf would provide about $756m of financial security to Kentucky Power and fund $100m in proposed winter bill credits for residential customers.

The amended agreements, signed Oct. 1 and announced Oct. 5, raise contracted power from 500 MW to 1 GW. The second 500 MW would arrive in 2029 instead of 2030, subject to approval by the Kentucky Public Service Commission and the utility's construction schedule. TeraWulf restated the expansion, with the same condition, in its Nov. 6 earnings release.

Payments continue if demand falls

Muskie's amended agreement doubles contracted power to 1 GW

Contracted utility power under Kentucky Power agreements; not energized load. Amendment needs state commission approval.

Table: Muskie contracted power rises from 500 MW to 1 GW; the second 500 MW phase moves to 2029 from 2030; phase terms are 20 and 15 years.
Item	Contracted power	Status or timing
Original agreement	500 MW	Contracted utility power before amendment
Amended agreement	1 GW if Kentucky Public Service Commission approves	Signed Oct. 1; subject to Kentucky Public Service Commission approval; original 500 MW stays in force until then
Second 500 MW phase	500 MW of the 1 GW	Target 2029 from 2030 if Kentucky Public Service Commission approves and utility builds
Phase one term	First 500 MW	20-year term (contracted)
Phase two term	Second 500 MW	15-year term (contracted)

Source: TeraWulf Oct. 5, 2026 release; Kentucky Power Muskie fact sheet Oct. 2026; Rackline cutUtility contracted power only, not energized or completed data-hall load. Second-phase 2029 timing and the amendment remain subject to Kentucky Public Service Commission approval and utility construction. Evaluated campus upside beyond 1 GW excluded. No Rackline arithmetic.

According to Kentucky Power's October fact sheet, TeraWulf must pay monthly charges based on at least 90% of its committed capacity even if it uses less. Phase one keeps its 20-year term and phase two has a 15-year term. The campus cannot cut its contracted capacity or exit during the first ten years.

Once the full commitment takes effect, the fact sheet estimates minimum payments of about $250m a year at today's rates, even if the campus uses no electricity. That floor makes the utility less dependent on how fast Muskie fills up. If TeraWulf's tenants ramp slowly, it still owes the bill.

The $756m security is separate from those payments, from the residential credits and from the Big Sandy charges described below. Kentucky Power can draw on the guarantees if TeraWulf fails to meet its obligations. The fact sheet does not say the full amount has been posted in cash.

TeraWulf would fund the residential credits at $10m a year for ten years, applied to January through March bills starting in 2029, if the commission approves. The fact sheet says wider effects on customer rates depend on utility costs, consumption and regulatory decisions, so the agreement promises no broader rate cut.

Big Sandy adds a separate obligation

TeraWulf would also pay the financing costs during construction of Kentucky Power's planned 760 MW combined-cycle plant at Big Sandy, until the plant enters service. That obligation depends on the commission approving both the special contract and the plant. It does not make TeraWulf responsible for the plant's full construction cost.

Until Big Sandy runs, Muskie would pay the actual market cost of its electricity instead of the standard fuel charge, plus a $17,000 monthly administrative fee. Those market costs would not flow into other customers' fuel charges. Muskie would draw power from the regional grid, not only from Big Sandy.

These protections address a different risk from Google's backing of Anthropic's lease at TeraWulf's Hawesville site, which supports tenant credit at the separate Justified campus. The Muskie package protects the utility and its existing customers.

The approval process is at an early stage. In an Oct. 30 filing in case 2026-00323, Kentucky Power said it intends to apply by Dec. 31. As of Nov. 6, the docket lists that notice, the commission's acknowledgment and the attorney general's motion to intervene, with no application or order. The fact sheet says the original agreement stays in force until approval.

Paying for these utility commitments is a separate problem from paying to build data halls. TeraWulf's Nov. 6 release says its revolving credit commitments rose to $400m from $250m after the quarter ended. Its Oct. 5 filing cited company-wide needs for utility letters of credit as one reason to seek more secured debt. It did not announce committed financing for Muskie or say that more financing would be obtained.

This story was updated to fix the formatting of a reference to Google's backing of Anthropic's Hawesville lease.