# Applied Digital A Dallas, TX-based AI cloud infrastructure and data center company. Founded in 2001, Applied Digital originally operated in the [[Bitcoin]] mining hosting business before pivoting to AI and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. Trades on the Nasdaq as APLD. ## Ellendale AI Factory Campus Applied Digital's flagship project is the Polaris Forge 1 campus in Ellendale, North Dakota — a purpose-built AI data center designed for 400 MW at full buildout. The facility uses multi-story buildings with high-density racks capable of accommodating nearly 50,000 [[NVIDIA]] H100-class GPUs in a single parallel compute cluster. All capacity at Ellendale is committed to [[CoreWeave]] under an $11 billion, 15-year take-or-pay lease agreement. ## NVIDIA Investment [[NVIDIA]] made a strategic investment of approximately $160 million in Applied Digital (alongside Related Companies), signaling confidence in the company's infrastructure buildout at a time when GPU cloud capacity is in severe shortage. ## Growth Trajectory For fiscal year 2026, Applied Digital reported $611.3 million in revenue, up 167% year over year. The Q4 FY2026 quarter alone hit $258.7 million in revenue, up 407% year over year. The company subsequently signed three 15-year take-or-pay leases with a high investment-grade hyperscaler totaling 810 MW and approximately $20.2 billion in base-term contracted revenue, bringing total contracted critical IT load to 1.4 GW and roughly $36 billion in base-term lease revenue. ## KB Relevance Applied Digital is a small-cap, high-risk counterpart to the infrastructure giants in the AI data center space. Where companies like [[Lancium]] have gigawatt-scale campuses backed by [[Blackstone]] and the [[Stargate Project]], Applied Digital is building its own path through GPU cloud hosting and [[CoreWeave]] partnerships. Its [[Bitcoin]]-to-AI pivot mirrors a broader industry pattern, and its explosive revenue growth illustrates how fast [[Artificial Intelligence]] infrastructure demand is scaling — even for smaller players competing in [[The Quest for 90 Gigawatts]]. ## See Also - [[NVIDIA]] - [[CoreWeave]] - [[Lancium]] - [[Blackstone]] - [[Stargate Project]] - [[Bitcoin]] - [[Artificial Intelligence]] - [[The Quest for 90 Gigawatts]]