Applied Digital

Applied Digital (APLD, Nasdaq) does not sell chips and does not rent GPUs by the hour. It builds data-center buildings in North Dakota and Texas, secures the megawatts to run them, and leases both to whoever needs compute at scale. Its largest tenant, by a wide margin, is CoreWeave — the same Nvidia-backed neocloud whose own report on this site tracks the demand side of the AI capex cycle. Applied Digital is the supply side: the landlord, not the renter.

It did not start there. The company was Applied Blockchain, Inc. when it uplisted to the Nasdaq at $5 a share in April 2022, a hosting provider for bitcoin-mining rigs. It renamed itself Applied Digital Corporation that November, keeping the ticker, and started describing the same buildings and the same power contracts as infrastructure for “high-performance computing.” The market did not buy the rebrand right away. Short seller Wolfpack Research called the pivot “an embarrassing and predictable stock promotion” in July 2023, labeling the company “a potato farm turned failed bitcoin miner” and flagging that insiders at investment bank B. Riley Financial held a stake near 48%. The stock fell double digits on the report. Applied Digital disputed it and kept building. What follows is the record of what the buildings turned into — and how thin outside coverage of that turn still is, which is exactly the gap a frontier-tier report exists to close.

TEXXR’s corpus first tags the company in September 2024, when Nvidia and other investors put $160 million into Applied Digital to fund its data-center and AI-cloud buildout — a chip supplier underwriting the power layer beneath it, months before the CoreWeave relationship existed on paper. Four months later, Applied Digital agreed to a financing partnership with Macquarie Asset Management worth up to $5 billion, aimed at funding its Ellendale, North Dakota campus without diluting equity. The capital arrived before the tenants did: Applied Digital’s fiscal Q3 2025 results, reported that April, missed revenue estimates as existing clients delayed renewing their leases, and the stock dropped more than 13%; the same week, CoinDesk reported the company was also moving to sell off its lower-margin cloud-computing unit — the first public sign Applied Digital was narrowing itself to the landlord business alone.

Then the CoreWeave leases arrived, and the narrative inverted. Applied Digital signed two 15-year leases with CoreWeave in June 2025 for 250 megawatts at its Ellendale campus, worth an estimated $7 billion in total revenue, and its stock jumped 48% in a single session. CoreWeave exercised an option for another 150 megawatts that August, pushing the campus to 400 megawatts and the contracted total to roughly $11 billion. By October, Applied Digital had closed the first tranche of the Macquarie facility, posted a quarter strong enough to send shares up another 16%, and signed a third lease — $5 billion, 200 megawatts, 15 years — with an unnamed U.S.-based, investment-grade hyperscaler at a second campus near Harwood, North Dakota. That customer’s identity has never been disclosed in any source found for this report; the record simply doesn’t say, which is itself worth flagging rather than guessing past. Combined, the CoreWeave and hyperscaler leases run to roughly $16 billion in contracted revenue across 600 megawatts — the first 50-megawatt phase went live on schedule in late October 2025.

Nvidia’s own position tells a sharper story than the leases do. Having seeded the pivot in 2024, Nvidia’s 13F filing revealed in February 2026 that it had sold its entire Applied Digital stake — all 7.7 million shares, worth roughly $180 million and close to ten times its original outlay — even as CoreWeave’s footprint on Applied Digital’s own land kept expanding. Nvidia backed the landlord early, then rotated the money toward the tenant instead. A month later, the relationship deepened in a different register: CoreWeave restructured its two largest Ellendale leases through a dedicated subsidiary, backed the arrangement with a parent guarantee and a $50 million letter of credit, and the refinanced debt earned an A3 investment-grade rating from Moody’s — several notches above CoreWeave’s own BB corporate rating, improving the collateral behind Applied Digital’s own 9.25% senior secured notes. Fiscal Q3 2026 revenue, reported that April, came in at $126.6 million, up 139% year over year, though a $59.7 million non-cash impairment on the cloud unit — now formally held for sale — widened the GAAP net loss to $100.9 million. In June 2026, Montana-Dakota Utilities signed an electric service agreement to supply a proposed 430-megawatt third campus near Center, North Dakota — the same utility that already powers Ellendale, and no tenant named yet.

TEXXR’s corpus carries exactly two articles tagged to Applied Digital across its full history: the September 2024 Nvidia investment and the April 2025 earnings miss. That’s the whole footprint — one article in 2024 Q3, one in 2025 Q2, and nothing since, per TEXXR’s own momentum tracking. All four extracted edges classify as financial, a 100% single-predicate profile. Querying the graph for edges connecting Applied Digital to CoreWeave directly returns zero — despite $16 billion in contracted lease revenue between them being the defining fact of both companies’ current existence. See CoreWeave’s own report for the contrast: 267 edges touch that name alone. The corpus that catches Meta’s $21 billion CoreWeave commitment same-day misses the landlord underneath CoreWeave’s own buildings entirely. That gap is not a flaw to route around — it’s the frontier-tier thesis in miniature: the news system covers the compute buyer, not the ground it stands on.

Positioning: how much of APLD is sold short, on the record brokers file twice a month. It lags by design — read it as where the crowd stood, not where it stands.

• Tenant concentration. Coverage estimates put roughly 70% of Applied Digital’s contracted revenue backlog against a single counterparty, CoreWeave — a number to hold against future lease disclosures, not press releases about new ones.
• The cloud-unit wind-down. The lower-margin GPU-cloud business, marked held-for-sale since the April 2025 disclosure and impaired again in Q3 FY2026, is the clearest signal of whether Applied Digital finishes its conversion to a pure landlord model or keeps a compute business alongside it.
• Polaris Forge 2’s hyperscaler. The $5 billion tenant behind the October 2025 lease has never been named in any source reviewed for this report. Whether that identity surfaces in a future 10-K or stays unconfirmed is its own signal about how these deals get disclosed.
• The credit-support template. The March 2026 CoreWeave-guaranteed, investment-grade-rated refinancing of two Ellendale leases is a structure — tenant credit enhancing landlord debt — that could repeat at Polaris Forge 2 and 3 if it worked as intended.
• Short interest against the backlog. Roughly 27% of Applied Digital’s float was reported sold short as of mid-2026, a level that sits uneasily next to a $16 billion contracted-revenue figure — the kind of split the record doesn’t resolve on its own.
• Polaris Forge 3’s tenant. The June 2026 Montana-Dakota Utilities power agreement covers 430 megawatts with no leaseholder named yet — the same sequence (power secured, tenant announced later) that preceded both prior campuses.

Applied Digital lives or dies by the same constraint as these names — small equal-weighted groups, one constraint each. Not investment products: see all categories.