Dallas, May 11, 2026, 07:04 CDT
ChronoScale, Applied Digital’s cloud unit, has started trading on Nasdaq under the ticker CHRN. Dallas-based Applied Digital holds about 97% of the new public company after spinning off the business into EKSO Bionics and putting in $15.75 million in cash. Chairman and CEO Wes Cummins described the move as a “deliberate step” to separate long-duration data-center hosting from the cloud compute segment, which he said carries a different risk profile. Applied Digital Corporation
Investors wasted no time: Applied Digital last changed hands at $41.25 ahead of Monday’s session. ChronoScale showed $15.57. So two tickers now, both tied to the same AI infrastructure theme.
APLD surged sharply ahead of the move. Zacks, in a piece published by Yahoo Finance on May 8, noted the stock jumped 62.4% since its previous earnings—a signal investors had already baked in part of the AI data-center narrative before the ChronoScale split hit.
ChronoScale pitches itself as an accelerated-compute platform, offering GPU access for AI model training, inference, and other performance-heavy tasks. Cenly Chen—ex-Chief Growth Officer and Senior VP at Super Micro Computer—steps in as CEO and takes a board seat. “The next phase of AI isn’t about access—it’s about execution,” Chen said. ChronoScale Corporation
The capital picture gets more complicated. Applied Digital has landed a $300 million senior secured bridge loan, with Goldman Sachs in the lead, to bankroll its third AI data center—Polaris Forge 1—in Ellendale, North Dakota. The 364-day facility is pegged to the Secured Overnight Financing Rate plus 275 basis points. CFO Saidal Mohmand noted the company’s focus on keeping its options open for longer-term debt.
April brought the real surge in demand: Applied Digital locked in a $7.5 billion, 15-year lease with a new U.S. investment-grade hyperscaler at its Delta Forge 1 campus—a sprawling 430-megawatt site built for AI. The hyperscaler, meaning a massive cloud or internet firm purchasing large-scale computing power, is taking up 300 MW of critical IT load here. With this deal, Applied’s total contracted lease revenue jumped beyond $23 billion.
Applied’s fiscal third quarter numbers landed with a jolt: revenue reached $126.6 million, a 139% surge from a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA clocked in at $44.1 million, while the net loss attributable to common stockholders widened to $100.9 million for the period ended Feb. 28. The company’s balance sheet showed $2.1 billion in cash and restricted cash against $2.7 billion in debt. The update also flagged agreements linked to CoreWeave leases at Polaris Forge 1.
Still, splitting off the unit doesn’t eliminate execution risk. ChronoScale’s filing listed just one cloud customer—Together AI—as of Dec. 31, 2025, warning that if that relationship ends or isn’t renewed, operating results could take a hit until new clients are brought on board. The same filing said Cloud ran 6,144 GPUs in fiscal 2025, generating $84.4 million in revenue, but posted a net loss of $72.7 million for the year.
Faisal Humayun Khan, writing for Barchart, flagged CHRN as a fresh spin-off, pointing out that Applied Digital still holds almost the entire stake in the company. On Barchart’s analyst-ratings page, ChronoScale carries a “Moderate Buy”—that’s based on just three analysts so far, highlighting sparse coverage for a newly public business. Barchart.com
Investors are watching three things now: if Applied can get its campuses running on schedule, if ChronoScale lands more customers, and if lenders stick with funding AI data centers on terms that keep equity attractive. Demand isn’t really the question here. Hitting targets—that’s the challenge.
