- Once known for its crypto mining compute and cloud services products, Applied Digital is making a name for itself in data center development
- It is known for its gigawatt-scale Ellendale campus, but its CEO said several similar projects are underway
- Applied Digital is fronting the massive costs for these projects, but expects revenue to roll in as they're brought online
Applied Digital’s name was in the headlines earlier this month when neocloud CoreWeave announced plans to lease 250 megawatts (MW) of compute capacity at Applied’s Ellendale, North Dakota, data center campus. That campus is notably one of a handful in the country right now expected to scale to 1 gigawatt of capacity. But while it’s the only one Applied has publicized, CEO Wes Cummins told Fierce the developer has several more up its sleeve.
“We have four in total that we think go to a gigawatt over time,” Cummins said. “This needs to happen by 2030, 2031. It needs to have a big piece very near term and the ability to scale.”
Judging from Cummins’ comments, the gigawatts facilities all seem to be in North Dakota. But Applied has titanic scale projects going in a total of three states in the MISO energy zone, which runs right down the middle of the U.S. These include a site in South Dakota where it has 430 MW of capacity already contracted.
Cummins did not reveal the third state it is working in, but beyond North Dakota and South Dakota, the MISO energy zone spans parts of 13 other states: Montana, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Texas in particular has recently emerged as a hotbed of data center construction.
So, why hasn’t Applied Digital talked about any of these the way it has with Ellendale? According to Cummins, the company has had its head down getting its supply chain in order. That means it’s been busy procuring power and making deals to secure critical supplies like backup generators, switch gear, chillers and transformers.
The point of all of that, he added, is to make sure those projects are more than just wishful thinking before they’re announced.
“For the last couple of years, we’ve been making deals to lock in capacity for the foreseeable future from really well-known manufacturers for all of those things,” he said. “If you don’t have all of the pieces of the puzzle, then it doesn’t matter.”
Size also matters
Part of the reason Applied is working on mammoth-scale projects is because that’s what its customers are looking for.
Cummins said customers want sites that offer a large chunk of capacity upfront by 2026 and a few hundred more megawatts by 2027. If it can’t eventually scale to a gigawatt, they’re not interested, he said.
For developers like Applied Digital, this means bearing a lot of upfront cost (which, as we recently noted, can be risky) with the promise of waves of revenue to follow once the facilities are online.
Applied Digital ended its fiscal third quarter (ended February 28, 2025) with $52.9 million in revenue but a net loss of $36.1 million. But that’s soon expected to change, thanks in part to the CoreWeave deal, which will generate an estimated $7 billion over the 15-year contract term. And now that Applied Digital has made public plans to offload its cloud services business - which would have competed with its prospective data center tenants - the company is hoping it can rake in even more large-scale deals.
The first 100 MW of capacity is expected to be ready for CoreWeave in Q4 of this year. According to Cummins, that means Applied Digital will be in the black by the end of its February 2026 quarter. There will be another big jump in revenue in the August quarter of its fiscal 2027 reporting year.
“The goal here we have in our sights is getting north of a billion NOI [net operating income] run rate in the end of [calendar] ’27, ’28 timeframe,” he concluded.