The Company
Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) designs, develops and operates high-power, next-generation data center infrastructure across North America. The business historically focused on power-intensive blockchain/mining colocation but has pivoted toward AI, HPC and hyperscale data center hosting — building large, high-density campuses (notably in North Dakota) and leasing capacity to cloud/neocloud and compute customers.
Financials
- Revenue (FY ended May 31, 2025): ~$144.2 million (continuing operations).
- Data-center operating results: The Data Center Hosting segment generated ~$142.3M of the company’s FY2025 revenue and produced positive segment operating profit (≈$63.9M). The HPC/other segments were not material to revenue in FY2025.
- Net result: The company reported a net loss for FY2025 (driven largely by non-cash losses on debt fair-value / conversion and financing items).
- Balance sheet / cash: Material capital spending in FY2025 (hundreds of millions) to build Polaris Forge 1; restricted cash and construction funds increased materially as projects progressed. Applied Digital Corporation+1
(Note: above figures are the company’s FY2025 disclosures — see the 10-K for line-by-line detail.) Applied Digital Corporation
Bull Case
- Massive contracts for long term data center leases being signed with several hyperscalers as the race to build AI infrastructure heats up.
- Potential new deal announcements with 3 hyperscalers.
- 1 Hyperscaler deal is imminent for the Polaris Forge 2 site. Initial contract will be for 200MW growing to a long term lease for the entire 1GW.
Bookings
| Customer | Announce date (public) | Capacity (MW) | Duration (term) | Reported contract value / revenue (announced) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave — initial leases | June 2, 2025 (press release) | 250 MW (Polaris Forge 1) | ~15 years (two ~15-yr leases) | ≈ $7.0 billion total over the ~15-yr term. |
| CoreWeave — additional lease (expansion) | Aug 29, 2025 (press release) | +150 MW (additional at Polaris Forge 1) | ~15 years (same/parallel long-term structure) | ≈ $4.0 billion (announced incremental value) — brings total anticipated CoreWeave-contracted revenue to ≈ $11.0 billion for 400 MW. |
| Marathon Digital Holdings (Marathon) | July 12 / July 18, 2022 (company announcements) | ~200 MW (Applied supplied ~90 MW in Texas + ~110 MW in ND; option to increase) | 5 years (hosting contract announced as five-year) | Not disclosed (company announced the 5-yr, ~200 MW hosting contract but did not publish a total contract dollar value). |
| Unnamed Hyperscaler 1 | Oct 2025 | Advanced talks for 200MW of Polaris Forge 2 and all of the 1GW in the future | In advanced direct discussions with a hyperscaler | |
| Unnamed Hyperscaler 2 | Oct 2025 | Discussions regarding a new site | ||
| Unnamed Hyperscaler 3 | Oct 2025 | Discussions regarding a new site |
TAM / CAGR
Applied Digital competes in the market for AI / high-performance data center infrastructure and high-density colocation. Recent industry estimates place the global AI-data-center / AI infrastructure market in the low-hundreds of billions of dollars in the mid-2020s with very high growth — for example one widely-published estimate projects a ~$236B market in 2025 growing to ~$934B by 2030 (CAGR ≈ 31.6%) (AI-data-center market).
APLD Management shared that hyperscalers are estimated to spend 350 Bill$ on datacenters in 2025 alone.
Products
Applied Digital offers low power usage effectiveness (PUE) for it’s data centers, a metric that measures how much electricity is consumed by a data center.
| Product / Service | What it is (brief) | FY2025 % of reported revenue (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| Data Center Hosting (blockchain & colocation) | Energized space, power and ops for customer-owned compute (historically crypto miners; increasingly HPC/AI tenants). | ~98.7% (Data Center Hosting revenue $142,267k of total $144,193k). |
| Related-party / Other (small contracts, legacy services) | Smaller legacy/related-party contracts and miscellaneous receipts. | ~1.3%. |
Data Centers
| Location (city, state) | Name / site code | Capacity (MW) — current / planned | Known client(s) | Status (operational / under construction / planned) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ellendale, North Dakota | Polaris Forge 1 (Ellendale campus / ELN) | 400MW complete; can scale to > 1 GW between 2028-2030 | CoreWeave 400 MW ; 11 Bill$ 15 years; June 2025 | first building targeted Q4 2025; second mid-2026; |
| Jamestown, North Dakota | JMS (Jamestown HPC campus) | Reported ~10 MW initial financing; public reporting also lists a larger facility footprint (journalism / filings cite 106 MW operation at Jamestown in some summaries). | Not publicly disclosed (serves Applied Digital’s HPC/colocation customers). | Operational (site-level financing and integrated systems testing reported; used for HPC workloads). |
| Harwood, North Dakota | Polaris Forge 2 (new campus) | 300MW under construction; can scale to 1GW | in advanced discussions a with potential hyperscaler for 200MW initially then full 1GW capacity | break ground Sept 2025; initial ops expected 2026, full capacity early 2027); development cost 3Bill$ |
| Adair County / Greenfield area, Iowa | (Adair County / Adair project) | Proposed ~200 MW (two buildings ~300k sq ft each described in project writeups) | Not yet disclosed (project is in development / targeting AI/HPC customers). | Proposed / planned (site project listings and local reporting). Data Center Map |
| (Proposed) South Dakota site | — | Project concept reporting up to ~430 MW (initial plan two large buildings totalling ~430 MW IT capacity) | Not disclosed (planning stage; Applied Digital said strong commercial interest). | Proposed / planning (public proposals / permitting discussions reported). Data Center Dynamics |
| 2 undisclosed sites | In negotiation with 2 hyperscalers |
Business Model
Applied Digital is essentially a developer/operator of high-density, low-cost-power data center campuses that monetizes through long-term leases and hosting contracts. Key elements: (1) develop and build high-power campuses (capex-heavy), (2) sign multi-year leases or pay-in-advance hosting agreements with high-compute tenants (crypto miners historically; increasingly AI/neocloud and HPC providers), (3) retain operational service revenue (maintenance, energy pass-throughs, operations) and (4) pursue financing and strategic partnerships (e.g., institutional/sovereign capital or strategic investors) to fund construction. The company has pursued sale/REIT-like transitions and large strategic lease deals to convert capex into contracted future cash flows. Applied Digital Corporation+1
Customers
- CoreWeave — a marquee AI/neocloud customer: Applied Digital signed multi-building, 15-year lease agreements to deliver large blocks (initially 250 MW) of IT load to CoreWeave at the Ellendale (Polaris Forge 1) campus, a deal the company has characterized as worth multiple billions over the term.
- Crypto-mining firms / customer-owned hardware — historically the core customer base for the Data Center Hosting business (customer hardware colocated in APLD facilities under multi-year hosting agreements).
- Emerging HPC / hyperscaler relationships — Applied Digital is actively courting and contracting with AI/HPC cloud providers and specialized GPU/cloud firms (beyond CoreWeave) as it repurposes capacity toward AI workloads.
Competitors
Applied Digital competes in the high-power, hyperscale / AI-optimized data-center and colocation market. Top peers with directly overlapping offerings include:
- Digital Realty (DLR)— global data-center REIT with large hyperscale and colocation footprint (competes for large enterprise and cloud leases; also evolving toward AI-optimized capacity). MarketsandMarkets
- Equinix (EQIX)— global interconnection and colocation leader; competes for high-density enterprise, cloud and hybrid workloads and is adding AI-focused offerings. Yahoo Finance
- QTS / CyrusOne / other U.S. colocation REITs (pick one as peer depending on context) — large U.S. colocation operators that bid for similar tenants and large lease deals (e.g., QTS, CyrusOne, and other regional data-center developers). These firms are the typical direct rivals when negotiating long-term capacity leases with cloud or enterprise customers. phoenixNAP | Global IT Services+1
Competition also comes indirectly from the hyperscalers — AWS/Microsoft/Google/Meta — which build their own facilities and from GPU-specialist neoclouds that may combine owned infrastructure with leased capacity.
Founding History
- The corporate entity traded as Applied Blockchain, Inc. during its earlier public life and rebranded to Applied Digital Corporation in November 2022 as the company broadened beyond blockchain/mining into broader HPC and AI infrastructure. The current operating pivot and growth phase traces to management actions around 2020–2022 when the company began large-scale North Dakota campus development and shifted strategy toward high-density compute hosting. Wes (Wesley) Cummins is a founder/co-founder and serves as Chairman and CEO; Jason Zhang has also been a principal early executive. Over the 2022–2025 period the company raised significant outside capital (including large commitments / investments and strategic financings) to fund Polaris Forge and other high-power sites.
Invest Alpha 