Applied Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: APLD) announced a 15-year lease agreement on Thursday with a new US-based investment-grade hyperscaler at its 430 megawatt Delta Forge 1 AI Factory campus currently under construction, with the deal carrying an estimated total contracted value of approximately $7.5 billion and covering 300 megawatts of critical IT load purpose-built for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads.
Shares jumped more than 12 percent in early trading following the announcement, reflecting the significance of the deal in both its absolute scale and its implications for the company’s revenue quality, with the new hyperscaler becoming Applied Digital’s second US-based investment-grade tenant and third hyperscale customer across its portfolio of AI Factory campuses.
The agreement lifts Applied Digital’s total contracted lease revenue to more than $23 billion, with over half of that total now backed by investment-grade counterparties, a credit profile improvement that significantly de-risks the company’s long-term revenue outlook and supports access to debt capital markets on favourable terms for funding the capital-intensive construction programmes the company is pursuing.
Initial operations at the Delta Forge 1 campus are anticipated to commence in mid-2027, with the site spanning more than 500 acres and engineered to support high-density AI training and inference workloads of the kind that major cloud providers are deploying at unprecedented scale as they race to build the infrastructure foundation for next-generation AI systems.
The deal is the latest in a series of major contract announcements from Applied Digital that have transformed its commercial profile over the past 18 months, following a $5 billion, 15-year lease signed in October 2025 at its Polaris Forge 2 campus in North Dakota, demonstrating that the company’s ability to attract and retain top-tier hyperscale tenants is becoming a repeatable competitive capability rather than a one-time event.
Applied Digital said it plans to finance the continued buildout through new credit facilities, with a bridge facility of up to $300 million referenced in its SEC filings, a capital structure approach that leverages the contracted revenue base as collateral to fund construction without diluting shareholders through equity issuance at what management considers an undervalued share price.
The unnamed hyperscaler is described only as a US-based company with high investment-grade credit, consistent with how Applied Digital has described previous tenants who have also remained confidential, a practice that reflects the counterparties’ preference for discretion around infrastructure commitments that could reveal competitive information about their AI buildout plans.
Applied Digital builds, owns, and operates large data centres designed specifically for AI workloads, positioning it in a distinct niche from general-purpose colocation providers by offering facilities with the power density, cooling architecture, and connectivity that AI training and inference at scale uniquely requires, a specialisation that commands premium lease rates and long-term tenant commitment.
The company’s stock had been trading around $14 before the announcement, having recovered from lows earlier in 2026 as the broader AI infrastructure investment thesis regained momentum following the Iran war’s initial disruption to technology sector sentiment, making Thursday’s 12 percent gain a significant incremental move on top of a stock that had already recovered substantially.
The broader context for the deal is a sustained and accelerating hyperscale commitment to AI infrastructure spending, with companies including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google collectively committing hundreds of billions of dollars to data centre expansion in 2026 alone, creating a demand environment for high-quality AI-optimised real estate that companies like Applied Digital are positioned to capture if they can execute on construction timelines.
