NEW YORK, January 2, 2026, 20:06 ET — Market closed
Applied Digital Corporation shares rose 14.6% on Friday to $28.11, after trading between $24.65 and $28.41. About 36.1 million shares changed hands.
The surge put the high-beta name — a stock that typically swings more than the broader market — back on traders’ screens as 2026 got underway. Applied Digital is scheduled to report fiscal second-quarter results on Jan. 7 after the close. 1
U.S. stocks started the year with the Dow and S&P 500 ending higher, helped by a rebound in chipmakers, while the Nasdaq finished little changed. “Investors might be a little bit more conscious about some of the valuations that they’re paying for some of the AI plays,” Joe Mazzola, head of trading and derivatives strategy at Charles Schwab, told Reuters. 2
Applied Digital designs, builds and operates data centers and offers colocation — renting space, power and cooling to customers — and hosting services tied to artificial intelligence, cloud and blockchain workloads, a Reuters company profile shows. 3
Because those projects demand heavy upfront spending and large, reliable power supplies, investors often trade the stock as a read-through on risk appetite and the cost of capital. That can magnify moves when the market swings between “growth at any price” and “show me the cash flow.”
Late last month, Applied Digital said it signed a non-binding term sheet — a preliminary agreement — to combine its cloud computing business with Ekso Bionics and launch ChronoScale, a GPU-accelerated compute platform (GPUs are chips widely used to train and run AI models). Applied Digital said it expects to own about 97% of the combined company and projected a first-half 2026 close, subject to definitive documents and shareholder approvals. 4
The company has pitched the proposal as a way to separate an AI compute platform from its data-center ownership and development business, allowing each unit to pursue its own capital strategy, it said. 4
Consensus estimates call for a loss of about 10 cents per share on expected revenue of about $82.22 million for the quarter, according to MarketBeat. 5
In the race for AI capacity, Applied Digital is competing for power, equipment and customers with larger data-center operators such as Digital Realty and Equinix, while also courting specialist AI cloud firms. Reuters previously reported the company signed a $5 billion lease with a U.S.-based hyperscaler — a large cloud provider — for 200 megawatts at a North Dakota campus, and expanded an agreement with CoreWeave. 6
Friday’s rally leaves the stock exposed to the next set of catalysts, including any shift in expectations for interest rates and the pace of AI infrastructure spending. For a capital-intensive builder, even small changes in funding costs can move project returns.
Before Monday’s session, investors will be watching a busy U.S. calendar that includes the monthly jobs report due Jan. 9 and consumer price data due Jan. 13, both of which can quickly reset bets on Federal Reserve rate cuts. Fourth-quarter earnings season also begins in earnest next week, led by major U.S. banks from Jan. 13. 7
Technically, traders will be watching whether the stock holds above the prior close area and avoids giving back Friday’s jump; the session high marks the first near-term hurdle. Any fresh detail on the ChronoScale timeline or additional long-term capacity deals could set the tone heading into the Jan. 7 report.
