Key conclusions
- Applied Digital has entered into a 15-year, $7.5 billion lease to operate 300 MW of IT capacity at its new Polaris Forge 3 campus.
- The company’s total order backlog increased to $31 billion, securing a total of 1,200 MW of contracted clean power for the artificial intelligence sector.
- The investment uses proprietary waterless and liquid cooling technology, and its launch is scheduled for August 2027.
US data center infrastructure developer Applied Digital has signed a 15-year, take-or-pay, binding agreement to lease space and computing power at its fourth AI Factory campus, Polaris Forge 3. The contract is with the same global investment-grade cloud services provider that secured the infrastructure at Delta Forge 1 in April 2026. The base value of the new agreement is approximately $7.5 billion. If all clauses and extension options are triggered, this value could increase to USD 18.2 billion.
Applied Digital’s revenue growth from AI infrastructure surges
The latest contract radically changes the financial position of the Texas supplier. The Dallas-based company increased its total contracted lease revenue across all four of its campuses to $31 billion. If the customer chose to exercise the full suite of extension options, this total would reach $73 billion.
Applied Digital’s current net order backlog includes 1,200 MW of critical IT load. In gross terms, this means the need to secure approximately 1,670 MW of electricity directly from the grid. Importantly for the financial stability of the project, approximately 65% of these future revenues are guaranteed by entities with the status of American hyper-scalers with a high investment rating.
For the Dallas-based company, this is the culmination of an extremely intense period. In just 11 months, the company concluded lease agreements for a total capacity of 1.2 GW. At the same time, the company is conducting advanced talks and promoting over 1.7 GW of additional power from the power grid in its new and existing locations.
Polaris Forge 3 – a new generation technological infrastructure
The new campus will be built in one of the northern US states and will cover an area exceeding 600 acres. The facility is expected to deliver 300 MW of critical IT load, with total grid power consumption estimated at approximately 430 MW. The operational start of the infrastructure is scheduled for August 2027.
The Polaris Forge 3 infrastructure is created with the highest density of computer equipment in mind, which forces a departure from traditional methods of energy and temperature management. The technical architecture of the facility is based on a waterless cooling system submitted to the patent office. Additionally, engineers will implement advanced liquid cooling systems.
The investment duplicates the operational architecture previously implemented in the twin projects Polaris Forge 1, Polaris Forge 2 and Delta Forge 1. The repeatable model allows for the serial construction of data centers optimized for mass training of large language models and mass artificial intelligence inference.
Financial implications of Applied Digital’s business transformation
The company is implementing a broad market transformation. Applied Digital comes from the bitcoin mining sector, but, following the example of several other large entities in this industry, it has almost completely switched its profile to providing HPC (High-Performance Computing) infrastructure and systems dedicated to artificial intelligence.
The reaction of financial markets to these reports turned out to be immediate. Within five days of announcing the details of the contract, the shares of the company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the symbol APLD increased by 6.8%. Taking a broader perspective, the company’s market valuation has increased by over 85% since the beginning of the year.
