Wall Street Cools on AI Data Center IPOs Amid Public Backlash and Investor Skepticism

The feverish investor appetite for AI infrastructure is showing its first real cracks, as a wave of data center and power-company IPOs stumbles heading into fall 2026. Companies that were supposed to dominate the new-issue market are quietly delaying or pulling back, signaling that Wall Street's tolerance for speculative, early-stage AI infrastructure bets has limits.

The most prominent stumble belongs to SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary that had planned to go public in September at a valuation of $50 billion or more. Bankers have struggled to find enough buyers within the price ranges sought, forcing a delay until at least mid-to-late October. The company's core pitch rests on a single massive project — a data center in Ohio to be leased to OpenAI and backstopped by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has pledged up to $105 billion to support the leases. Despite projecting a $439 billion revenue backlog over roughly 20 years starting in 2028, SB Energy has not yet put a single data center into operation, a thin track record that is spooking institutional buyers. The company resorted to hosting an investor call featuring OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar and infrastructure chief Sachin Katti to try to shore up confidence.

Nuclear energy supplier Holtec, which had planned to raise up to $900 million on Nasdaq at a $10 billion valuation, went further — pausing its IPO indefinitely, citing 'uncertainty of data center development' as the primary culprit. Power company Aggreko, which counts AI data centers among its largest customers, has also slowed its offering timeline, citing both data center headwinds and rising interest rates. Together, these delays represent a rare and visible speed bump for an industry that has enjoyed nearly unchecked enthusiasm from capital markets.

The backdrop is a growing political and cultural revolt against data centers. Communities across the country — particularly in rural areas — have pushed back against these power-hungry facilities, and heading into the 2026 midterms, opposition to data centers has become a cross-partisan flashpoint. Several states have enacted measures to curtail development, adding regulatory risk to execution risk. Meanwhile, prominent AI executives publicly warning about the technology's dangers in the past week have added to an already anxious mood.

Despite the turbulence, the broader buildout thesis hasn't collapsed. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle have collectively committed more than $1 trillion to infrastructure. PIMCO estimates $5 trillion in total spending will be needed by 2030. More established players — Vantage Data Centers (25+ facilities built), CyrusOne (55+, backed by KKR and BlackRock), and Switch — are still expected to go public. Nscale, which counts Anthropic and Microsoft as customers, filed its financials Friday for an October offering and may serve as the first real pricing test in this more skeptical environment. Anthropic's own IPO remains on track for this fall. Data center companies had been expected to account for roughly one-third of all new listings for the rest of 2026 — that pipeline isn't gone, but it's now being stress-tested.