Bally’s Las Vegas Project Stalled as Financing Dries Up

Kyle Kevin

iGaming Writer

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Bally’s $1.19 billion Las Vegas Strip project faces mounting pressure as the A’s stadium nears its 2028 debut — with the company cash-strapped, two quarters of late SEC filings, and its landlord GLPI unwilling to commit beyond $125 million.

Bally’s Corp has a $1.19 billion Las Vegas Strip project with no clear path to funding. The company reported $559.3 million in cash against $4.3 billion in long-term net debt at the end of Q1 2026. It has filed late SEC reports for two consecutive quarters, including a Form 12b-25 this week delaying Q2 results. Chairman Soo Kim has said Bally’s will build a retail-entertainment district first — not the casino or hotel — around the Oakland A’s new $2 billion stadium. That stadium opens in spring 2028. The A’s are already preparing contingency plans to build their own surrounding infrastructure if Bally’s cannot deliver, at a cost of $100 million. Steve Hill, CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, told The Athletic that Bally’s “doesn’t have the financing” and gave the company an August deadline to present a plan. Bally’s declined to comment. The project sits on the 35-acre former Tropicana site, which Bally’s bought for $148 million in 2021 and demolished in 2024. Its landlord, GLPI, has pledged $125 million but is not prepared to commit more.

The Financing Squeeze

Bally’s balance sheet does not support a $1.19 billion Strip buildout. The $559.3 million cash reserve is dwarfed by $4.3 billion in net debt. The company has missed SEC filing deadlines for two straight quarters, a red flag for investors and lenders. Shares trade around $13.70, down roughly 18% year-to-date despite a 5% bounce this week. The financing gap is not a new problem. Bally’s has spread itself across multiple mega-projects simultaneously: the $1.7 billion Chicago casino, a $4 billion New York bid, the Australian Star Entertainment pursuit, and the Las Vegas development. The Intralot merger last year netted “more than $1 billion” in cash and credit, but much of that was earmarked for New York. Fitch Ratings removed Bally’s from “rating watch negative” in October 2025 and upgraded to stable, citing land-based casino stability. However, Fitch noted that pursuing Las Vegas or New York would require “material funding from third parties.” Kim has not ruled out selling the Vegas site entirely. “You never say never,” he said at ICE Barcelona in January. “Obviously if someone were to come to us and come with a price we couldn’t say no to, we would consider it.” That is not the language of a company confident it can self-finance.

What Bally’s Plans to Build

Bally’s filed its most detailed timeline with Clark County in December 2025: a four-phase buildout completing by December 2030. The plan calls for 3,000 hotel rooms across two towers, a 90,000-square-foot casino, 110,000 square feet of meeting space, a 2,500-seat entertainment venue, and more than 500,000 square feet of retail, dining, and entertainment. The lone rendering shows the development essentially wrapping around the A’s stadium. However, the execution order has flipped. Kim said at ICE Barcelona in January that Bally’s is “actually more focused on developing an RED, a retail-entertainment district, around the stadium to complement the traffic the stadium brings, even before we build our integrated resort and casino.” CFO Mira Mircheva and attorney Dan Reaser repeated that message in June. Reaser told the Nevada Gaming Commission that the April 2028 deadline applies only to the stadium, parking garage, utilities, and plaza — not the hotel and casino towers. The implication is clear: when the A’s take the field in 2028, they may be surrounded by a construction site. That prospect has the team preparing a $100 million contingency to build its own infrastructure. For visitors to Las Vegas and beyond, the Strip’s newest district could arrive in pieces rather than as a finished product.

GLPI’s Role and Limits

Gaming and Leisure Properties owns the land and leases it to Bally’s under a 50-year agreement with options to 99 years. In Bally’s Q1 filing, the company admitted “the renewal options are not considered reasonably certain to be exercised.” That is a telling footnote. GLPI has over $2 billion tied to Bally’s projects nationwide, including $1.58 billion for Chicago alone. For Las Vegas, GLPI originally allocated $175 million toward shared improvements, primarily for Tropicana demolition. It has since capped fresh investment at $125 million. During GLPI’s Q1 earnings call on July 31, COO Brandon Moore said Bally’s is “coming close, I think, to a more concrete plan for some of the critical infrastructure that needs to support the stadium.” He mentioned “access ways” and “utility conduits” as potential areas for GLPI investment. However, he added: “I don’t think we’re prepared at the present time to commit to anything over the $125 million.” GLPI CEO Peter Carlino has been consistent. In 2023 he said GLPI would invest further only “to the extent we deem that doing so will generate an attractive risk-adjusted return.” In October 2025 he told analysts: “It is unlikely that we will finance the entire project.” The landlord is not acting as a backstop. That leaves Bally’s to find external financing for a Strip project in a market where visitation has softened since late 2024 and two recent mega-resorts — Resorts World and Fontainebleau — have struggled to find solid footing after costly delays. Kim acknowledged the risk at ICE: “Vegas is the one with the widest standard deviation of outcomes. You could do really well in Vegas, or you could do really poorly.” Right now, Bally’s appears to be betting it can do neither until someone else puts up the money.

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