APLD
Another day, another giant AI lease
Applied Digital is back with a fresh hyperscaler deal, and the market did what the market does: hit the buy button. The company said it signed a long-term lease for its new Polaris Forge 3 campus, a 300 MW AI infrastructure site in a Northern state, with the same undisclosed U.S. hyperscaler that was behind its Delta Forge 1 agreement.
That’s not just a nice little ribbon-cutting announcement. Applied Digital says this pushes it past 1 GW of contracted capacity and lifts total contracted lease revenue to about $31 billion. In other words, this is becoming less of a “future potential” story and more of a “hey, they actually keep landing the tenants” story.
Why investors care
Here’s the part that matters:
- The deal is a 15-year take-or-pay lease, which means the customer is on the hook whether they use every inch of the space or not.
- Base contracted revenue is estimated at roughly $7.5 billion, with upside to $18.2 billion if all options get exercised.
- The company says Polaris Forge 3 is its fourth AI factory campus, which suggests it’s trying to turn this into a repeatable template instead of a one-off moonshot.
That’s the kind of setup Wall Street usually loves: big recurring contracts, long duration, and a story that rhymes with the AI buildout everyone’s obsessed with.
The stock is doing the obvious thing
APLD shares jumped in after-hours trading, which is what you’d expect when a company in the middle of an AI-fueled growth narrative announces a multibillion-dollar lease. Investors are basically asking one question: if hyperscalers keep signing these giant checks, how much bigger can this get?
Big picture: Applied Digital is trying to prove it’s not just renting out server-adjacent real estate — it’s building the plumbing for the AI arms race, one massive lease at a time.