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 (≈$63.9M). The HPC/other segments were not material to revenue in FY2025.
- Net result: The company reported a net loss for FY2025 (driven largely by non-cash losses on debt fair-value / conversion and financing items).
- Balance sheet / cash: Material capital spending in FY2025 (hundreds of millions) to build Polaris Forge 1; restricted cash and construction funds increased materially as projects progressed. Applied Digital Corporation+1
(Note: above figures are the company’s FY2025 disclosures — see the 10-K for line-by-line detail.) Applied Digital Corporation
Bull Case
- Massive contracts for long term data center leases being signed with several hyperscalers as the race to build AI infrastructure heats up.
- Potential new deal announcements with 3 hyperscalers.
- 1 Hyperscaler deal is imminent for the Polaris Forge 2 site. Initial contract will be for 200MW growing to a long term lease for the entire 1GW.
Management Outlook
- At the center of our approach is what we call our franchise model. When we begin development at a new campus, we establish the same core group of approximately 15 to 20 leadership positions, each reporting directly to headquarters. This repeatable operating structure, combined with the strength of our supply chain and our status as an approved supplier with every major hyperscaler, positions us to deliver a platform that is both differentiated and scalable. We believe this model is one of the key reasons we have emerged as a clear leader in the industry
Bookings
| Customer | Announce date (public) | Capacity (MW) | Duration (term) | Reported contract value / revenue (announced) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave | June 2, 2025 (press release) | 400 MW at Polaris Forge 1 | 15 years | 11 Bill$ |
| Unnamed Hyperscaler 1 | Jan 2026 | 1 GW across Polaris Forge 2 (200MW), Delta Forge 1 (300MW / 7.5Bill$), Polaris Forge 3 (300MW / 7.5 Bill$), Delta Forge 2 (210MW / 5.2Bill$) | 15 years | 25.2 Bill$ |
| Marathon Digital Holdings | July 12 / July 18, 2022 (company announcements) | ~200 MW (Applied supplied ~90 MW in Texas + ~110 MW in ND; option to increase) | 5 years | Not disclosed |
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.
| Component | APLD | Customer |
|---|---|---|
| Land / Building | ✅ | ❌ |
| Power infrastructure (substation, transformers) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Cooling systems | ✅ | ❌ |
| Physical security | ✅ | ❌ |
| Servers / GPUs | ❌ | ✅ |
| Racks / internal cabling | ❌ | ✅ |
| Networking equipment | ❌ | ✅ |
| Software / AI models | ❌ | ✅ |
| Electricity cost | ⚠️ (passes through) | ✅ (economic burden) |
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 