Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD), a digital infrastructure provider, saw its shares jump 2.7% in pre-market trading after announcing its first international expansion outside the United States.
The company entered into an agreement granting access to up to 1 gigawatt of potential power capacity in Finland to construct a large-scale AI Factory campus.
Initial power availability for the Nordic development is targeted for 2028, according to the company’s announcement.
Applied Digital stated it is engaged in active discussions with hyperscale clients to support specialized artificial intelligence workloads at the Finland facility.
Access to gigawatt-scale power infrastructure represents a critical operational milestone for high-performance computing providers amid surging artificial intelligence infrastructure demand globally.
Expanding into Europe allows the company to broaden its operational footprint beyond domestic facilities while establishing capacity to serve international cloud customers.
After the initial pre-market pop, shares cooled to $25.40, representing a gain of 2.7% from the previous close.
Applied Digital’s shares are considered extremely volatile, having recorded 99 moves greater than 5% over the last year, suggesting markets view today’s news as meaningful but not fundamentally transformative.
Just four days prior, the stock gained 4.6% after the company announced the second phase of Building 2 at its Polaris Forge 1 campus in Ellendale, North Dakota reached Ready for Service status.
That milestone added 75 MW of critical IT load across three 25 MW halls, completing Building 2’s 150 MW total and lifting the campus’s fully operational critical IT load to 250 MW.
The full 400 MW Polaris Forge 1 campus is fully leased, underscoring strong demand for the company’s existing domestic infrastructure.
Applied Digital is down 9.7% since the beginning of the year and is trading 48.8% below its 52-week high of $49.65 reached in May 2026.
Despite the year-to-date decline, investors who purchased $1,000 worth of Applied Digital shares five years ago would now hold an investment worth $1,857.
The Finland agreement signals a strategic pivot toward global growth as AI infrastructure investment continues to accelerate across both North American and European markets.
