Applied Digital Signs Lease at Delta Forge 2, Expanding Its AI Factory Franchise Model to a Fifth Campus

Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) has entered into a new long-term lease agreement at Delta Forge 2, a purpose-built AI Factory campus located in a new southern state. The lease is with a U.S. based high investment-grade hyperscaler, marking the company’s fifth AI Factory campus overall.

The agreement covers 210 MW of critical IT load under a 15-year take-or-pay structure with renewal options, representing approximately $5.2 billion in base-term contracted revenue, or approximately $12.7 billion if all renewal options are exercised over a 30-year total term.

“Two years ago, we made a deliberate decision to build a company that scales, not just builds data centers,” said Wes Cummins, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Applied Digital. “We call it our franchise model — a core team of design, construction, and operations professionals replicated across every campus, in every market. Continued demand from leading hyperscalers across five campuses is strong validation of our model.”

With this agreement, which represents Applied Digital’s third long-term lease with the same U.S. based investment-grade hyperscaler, the company’s contracted portfolio spans five AI Factory campuses, representing 1.4 GW of critical IT load, approximately 2.15 GW of grid-connected utility power, and approximately $36 billion in total contracted base-term lease revenue, or $86 billion if all renewal options are exercised. Approximately 70% of contracted revenue is now backed by U.S. based investment-grade hyperscalers.

Applied Digital’s site selection strategy prioritizes communities where large-scale, long-duration infrastructure investment creates meaningful and lasting economic impact, including local employment, an expanded tax base, and sustained economic activity over the life of each project.

“We are deliberate about where we build,” Cummins continued. “We look for communities where this kind of investment genuinely matters — where the jobs, the tax base, and the long-term economic activity have real impact. We have built a track record of being good partners to those communities, and we take that responsibility seriously. That track record is part of how we earn the right to keep building.”

Delta Forge 2 is expected to bring meaningful local employment, construction activity to its host community. The campus integrates Applied Digital’s proprietary waterless cooling technology and high-power density infrastructure, purpose-built for the compute densities required by large-scale AI training and inference workloads. Initial operations are anticipated to commence in Q1 2028.