New York, June 9, 2026, 05:08 EDT
- Applied Digital signed a 15-year, 210-megawatt lease at its Delta Forge 2 AI data center campus.
- APLD rose in after-hours trade Monday; the first full regular-session test comes Tuesday.
- The deal adds to a contracted lease book that Applied Digital says now totals about $36 billion.
Applied Digital shares were set for a fresh test Tuesday after the data-center developer signed a 15-year lease expected to generate about $5.2 billion, the latest in a string of artificial-intelligence infrastructure deals that has put APLD back in the market’s sights. Reuters reported the stock rose 8.7% in extended trading after the announcement.
This matters now because the market has been looking for proof that Applied Digital can turn power access and land into long-dated customer contracts. The new lease lifts the company’s contracted base-term lease revenue to about $36 billion, or roughly $86 billion if all renewal options are exercised.
Regular U.S. trading had not opened at the dateline time. Nasdaq’s 2026 holiday calendar lists Juneteenth on June 19 as the next full market closure, so Tuesday is a normal trading day for the first cash-session reaction.
Benzinga reported Applied Digital at $44.35 in Monday after-hours trading, up 8.45%, against a prior close of $40.95. Premarket prints can be thin and can move before the opening bell, but that quote put the shares near their recent highs after a volatile stretch for AI-linked infrastructure names.
The lease covers 210 megawatts, or MW, of “critical IT load” — the power capacity used by computing equipment — at Delta Forge 2, a new AI-focused campus in an unnamed southern U.S. state. It is structured as take-or-pay, meaning the customer pays for the contracted capacity even if it does not use all of it. Applied Digital Corporation
Chairman and Chief Executive Wes Cummins said Applied Digital had set out to “build a company that scales, not just builds data centers.” He said demand from leading hyperscalers, large cloud or internet infrastructure operators, validated the model. Applied Digital Corporation
The customer was not named. Applied Digital said it was the third long-term lease with the same U.S.-based investment-grade hyperscaler, a term that indicates a borrower or tenant seen by rating firms as having lower credit risk. About 70% of the company’s contracted revenue is now backed by U.S.-based investment-grade hyperscalers.
Funding is the other half of the trade. Earlier Monday, Applied Digital said it closed a revolving credit facility of up to $550 million, with $350 million committed and a $200 million accordion option, to support pre- and post-lease data-center development and working capital. Chief Financial Officer Saidal Mohmand said the facility provides “additional flexibility to advance our development pipeline.” Applied Digital Corporation
CoreWeave remains part of the competitive and customer context. Applied Digital said it entered a memorandum of understanding on June 5 to assign the lease for Building 3 at Polaris Forge 1 to a CoreWeave subsidiary if that subsidiary receives an investment-grade credit rating. In early indications Tuesday, CoreWeave was up 2.0%, while Nebius, another AI-infrastructure name investors watch, was down 4.3%.
The broader tape gave the stock some help. The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.86% on Monday as chip shares rebounded, with the Philadelphia semiconductor index up 5.6%. Rick Meckler, partner at Cherry Lane Investments, told Reuters the move looked like “bargain hunting” after a big tech selloff. Reuters
Applied Digital is still a construction and financing story, not just a backlog story. In its fiscal third quarter, the company reported revenue of $126.6 million, up 139% from a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA — profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, with company adjustments — of $44.1 million. It also posted a $100.9 million net loss attributable to common stockholders and ended February with $2.1 billion in cash and restricted cash against $2.7 billion in debt.
The risk is that signed leases do not remove execution risk. Applied Digital warned that results could differ if customers do not renew, construction slips, financing becomes harder to secure, power supply is disrupted, regulations change or key-customer dependence becomes a problem. A delay at Delta Forge 2, whose first operations are expected in the first quarter of 2028, would leave investors waiting longer for the revenue now being priced into the shares.
For now, the stock move is about confidence that Applied Digital can keep converting scarce power and data-center sites into contracted AI capacity. The next check comes at the open.
