NEW YORK, January 4, 2026, 07:16 ET — Market closed.
Applied Digital shares ended Friday up 14.6% at $28.11, after trading between $24.65 and $28.44. The Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.03% while the S&P 500 rose 0.19% on the first trading day of 2026.
The move keeps Applied Digital in focus as investors track the fast-growing corner of the market building data centers and computing capacity for artificial intelligence.
Why it matters now: these projects require heavy upfront spending on power and construction, and the stocks tend to swing sharply when investors reprice growth and financing risk.
Applied Digital is scheduled to host its fiscal second-quarter conference call on Jan. 7 at 5 p.m. ET, according to the company’s investor calendar. Analysts polled by FactSet expect quarterly revenue to rise 143% to about $86.7 million, Investor’s Business Daily reported.
Investors will listen for updates on construction timelines, customer additions and the pace of capital spending, alongside any commentary on margins and liquidity.
Late last month, Applied Digital said it signed a non-binding term sheet to combine its cloud computing business with Nasdaq-listed Ekso Bionics Holdings to form ChronoScale, a platform built around graphics processing units (GPUs) — chips used to train and run AI models. Applied Digital said it would own about 97% of the combined company and expects the deal to close in the first half of 2026, subject to due diligence and approvals; the cloud unit generated about $75.2 million in trailing 12-month revenue as of Aug. 31, 2025. Chairman and CEO Wes Cummins said ChronoScale is meant to “deliver accelerated compute at scale for the most demanding AI workloads.” Applied Digital Corporation
Applied Digital signed a $5 billion, 15-year lease with a U.S.-based hyperscaler for 200 megawatts at its Polaris Forge 2 campus in North Dakota in October, Reuters reported. That lifted total leased capacity across its Polaris Forge 1 and 2 sites to 600 MW; the company earlier finalized another lease with CoreWeave for an additional 150 MW in the state. A hyperscaler is industry jargon for a cloud operator that buys data center capacity at massive scale.
The stock’s volatility remains a defining feature. Applied Digital has traded between $3.31 and $40.20 over the past 52 weeks, according to Investing.com data.
High short interest can add fuel around earnings. Applied Digital had 78.69 million shares sold short — about 31% of its public float — as of Dec. 15, MarketBeat data show. Short interest measures how many shares investors have borrowed and sold in a bet the stock will fall.
Before next session:
Beyond company-specific news, traders will watch whether next week’s U.S. jobs report and inflation data shift expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts. The employment report is due Jan. 9 and the consumer price index is due Jan. 13, Reuters reported; the same report noted Fed funds futures point to little chance of a cut at the late-January meeting and nearly a 50% chance of a quarter-point cut in March.
For Applied Digital, the immediate technical test is whether Friday’s surge holds. Support is likely near the $25 area, around the prior session’s opening trade, while resistance sits around the $28-$29 zone where shares peaked.
