Applied Digital Lands $7.5B Hyperscaler Deal—Its Fifth AI Campus Just Hit the Jackpot
Applied Digital announced a $7.5 billion 15-year lease with a U.S.-based 'high investment-grade hyperscaler' at its Delta Forge 1 campus, bringing total contracted revenue to over $23 billion and making investment-grade hyperscalers its majority revenue base.
- Applied Digital signed a $7.5 billion 15-year lease with a U.S.-based hyperscaler for its Delta Forge 1 campus.
- The deal brings total contracted revenue to over $23 billion—more than 50% now backed by investment-grade customers.
- Delta Forge 1 is designed for 430 MW of AI and HPC infrastructure, with operations expected to begin mid-2027.
Applied Digital has locked in a $7.5 billion lease agreement with a U.S.-based “high investment-grade hyperscaler” at its Delta Forge 1 campus, the company announced on April 23, 2026. The 15-year contract covers 300 megawatts of critical IT load purpose-built for AI and high-performance compute workloads, marking a significant expansion beyond Applied Digital’s two existing hyperscale tenants.
With this agreement, the hyperscaler becomes Applied Digital’s third hyperscale tenant overall and second investment-grade customer—a milestone that pushes the company’s total contracted lease revenue past $23 billion. More than half of that revenue is now backed by investment-grade customers, a shift that fundamentally changes how Wall Street should value the data center operator’s revenue stream.
“We remain focused on delivering operational AI capacity at scale,” said Wes Cummins, Chairman and CEO of Applied Digital. With this deal, the company now counts two investment-grade hyperscalers across its portfolio, strengthening “the overall quality and visibility of our contracted revenue,” Cummins added.
Why This $7.5B Deal Matters for the AI Infrastructure War
Delta Forge 1 spans more than 500 acres and is custom-engineered for AI workloads—high-density power delivery, advanced cooling, and disciplined operational design aimed at both training and inference deployments. Initial operations are expected to commence in mid-2027, meaning the revenue won’t hit immediately but will lock in a decade and a half of cash flow visibility starting next year.
The cloud infrastructure market has become a land grab for available capacity. While the hyperscaler’s identity remains undisclosed, the average transaction size suggests a major public cloud provider—AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or possibly Meta—expanding its training or inference footprint to meet surging AI demand.
Announced alongside the lease: up to $300 million in senior secured bridge financing for Building 3 at Polaris Forge 1, plus a $300 million revolving credit facility for development activities and working capital. The financing expansion signals confidence from institutional lenders that Applied Digital’s revenue quality has reached a level where debt markets are willing to fund growth.
Applied Digital traded at roughly $23.50 per share ahead of the announcement—a price that reflected investor uncertainty about whether the company could land investment-grade hyperscalers at scale. Monday’s disclosure suggests those concerns were overblown.
