New York, January 7, 2026, 18:01 ET — After-hours
Applied Digital shares rose about 7% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the data center operator posted quarterly revenue that beat Wall Street estimates, helped by demand for capacity used to train and run AI models. The company reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $126.6 million for the period ended Nov. 30, versus analysts’ estimate of $88 million, according to LSEG data.
The report lands as investors try to sort durable AI infrastructure spending from short bursts of capital spending that can fade when budgets tighten. Smaller builders still have to prove they can sign long leases and finance construction without constantly tapping the market.
A lot of the debate comes down to power and timing. Data center capacity is sold in megawatts — a rough proxy for how much electricity a site can deliver — and the market tends to reprice these stocks on each lease, each build milestone, and each hint of slippage.
Applied Digital was last at $29.56, down about 2% from Tuesday’s close, after swinging between $28.20 and $32.17 during the session, trade data showed.
In a company update, Applied Digital said revenue rose 250% from a year earlier and net loss narrowed to $31.2 million, while adjusted EBITDA — a measure of operating profit that excludes some items — was $20.2 million. CoreWeave has 400 megawatts under contract at its Polaris Forge 1 “AI Factory” campus in North Dakota, and an investment-grade U.S. hyperscaler — a large cloud company — has leased 200 MW at Polaris Forge 2, lifting total leased capacity to 600 MW, it said. Chief Executive Wes Cummins pointed to the Dakotas’ “cool climate” and abundant energy and said Applied Digital was in advanced discussions with another investment-grade hyperscaler; the company is holding a 5 p.m. ET call to discuss the results. GlobeNewswire
Applied Digital late last month outlined a plan to spin out its cloud business and combine it with Ekso Bionics to form ChronoScale, an accelerated-compute platform aimed at AI workloads. The companies said they expect the deal to close in the first half of 2026.
AI-linked infrastructure names have been whipsawed this week by talk from Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang at CES in Las Vegas, where he said coming chips could cut data-center cooling needs and drove HVAC stocks lower. Barclays analyst Julian Mitchell wrote that Nvidia’s comments looked “dramatic at first glance,” but should not be brushed off given Nvidia’s weight in the AI stack. Reuters
But Applied Digital still has to build out new capacity on time and keep funding costs under control. A slowdown in AI spending, a delay in power delivery, or heavy reliance on a small number of big customers can land quickly in a stock that trades on milestones.
Beyond the company call, traders have one eye on Friday’s U.S. December jobs report (Jan. 9) for clues on whether rate-cut bets get rebuilt. That matters for smaller, high-growth AI and data-center shares that can swing with the macro almost as much as with the quarter.
