Applied Digital Jumps 16% on Strong Earnings, $11B AI Data Contract
Q1 revenue surged 84% year-over-year as the company secured a new 150 MW lease, fully booking its next-generation data center campus.
Shares of Applied Digital (APLD) surged over 16% after the company announced strong first-quarter financial results and a landmark agreement that underscores the booming demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The data center operator reported a significant revenue beat and secured a major new lease that brings its total contracted revenue at a key facility to approximately $11 billion.
For the fiscal first quarter, , an 84% increase compared to the same period last year. While the company is still investing heavily in growth, posting a net loss of $27.8 million, the top-line momentum captured investor attention and signaled that its strategic pivot to high-performance computing (HPC) is paying off.
The centerpiece of the announcement was a new 150-megawatt (MW) lease with cloud provider CoreWeave at Applied Digital’s Polaris Forge 1 campus in North Dakota. This agreement, which makes the campus fully leased, is a massive validation of the company's next-generation data center designs tailored for the intense power and cooling demands of AI workloads.
This deal brings the total anticipated contracted lease revenue for the Polaris Forge 1 campus to , providing a stable, long-term revenue stream. The news prompted a wave of positive sentiment, as on the company's trajectory in the competitive AI infrastructure space.
With its first campus fully booked, Applied Digital is already breaking ground on its second North Dakota campus, Polaris Forge 2, which is designed for future expansion up to 1 gigawatt. Management stated the company is on a projected annualized Net Operating Income (NOI) run rate of approximately $500 million once Polaris Forge 1 is fully operational, positioning it as a key emerging player in the infrastructure that powers the AI revolution.