Applied Digital x CoreWeave (Ellendale 250MW leases)

Applied Digital is a Nasdaq-listed data center developer (ticker APLD) that started as a Bitcoin-hosting operator and pivoted, from 2023 on, into building large HPC and AI campuses on the Northern Plains. Its flagship site, Polaris Forge 1 in Ellendale, North Dakota (originally the "Ellendale HPC" project), is the anchor of a 15-year lease with CoreWeave; the first 100 MW building was fully energized in November 2025 and a second building came online July 2026. The company is one of the very few pure-play AI-factory landlords at gigawatt scale outside the traditional colocation majors.\n\nIn late 2025 Applied Digital reorganized around the landlord model. It signed a roughly $5 billion, multi-hundred-megawatt AI-factory lease with an unnamed US investment-grade hyperscaler at Polaris Forge 2, crossed 1 GW of contracted capacity at Polaris Forge 3 by May 2026, and in June 2026 opened a fifth campus with a 210 MW lease at Delta Forge 2. At the same time it separated its GPU cloud business into a standalone company, ChronoScale, via a combination with EKSO announced in December 2025, so that the parent no longer sells GPU hours and does not disclose an operator-owned GPU fleet or hourly pricing.\n\nWhat makes Applied Digital distinctive versus the rest of the neocloud pack is that it competes on the physical layer rather than the compute layer. It sits closer to QTS, Vantage or DataBank than to CoreWeave or Nebius: hyperscaler-grade liquid-cooled shells, financed with senior secured notes (a $2.35 billion issue in November 2025 and a $1.59 billion issue in June 2026) and Macquarie development loans, and leased to a single anchor tenant per building on long dated terms.

CoreWeave is the largest of the "neocloud" GPU operators, a category of specialist infrastructure providers built to rent Nvidia accelerators to AI labs and enterprises at hyperscale. Founded in 2017 in New Jersey as Atlantic Crypto, it pivoted from Ethereum mining into AI infrastructure and by 2025 was operating roughly 250,000 GPUs across 32 data centers in the United States and Europe. Its March 28, 2025 IPO on Nasdaq under ticker CRWV raised $1.5 billion and made it the first pure-play GPU cloud to trade publicly.\n\nWhat distinguishes CoreWeave from the rest of the neocloud pack is its depth of concentration with the two entities that matter most in AI infrastructure: Nvidia, which is both a strategic investor and its preferred launch partner for new silicon generations (H100, H200, GB200/B200), and a small set of anchor tenants that account for the vast majority of its revenue. Microsoft alone drove more than 60% of 2024 revenue, and a five-year OpenAI contract signed in 2025 is worth roughly $12 billion. That anchor-tenant model let CoreWeave scale faster than competitors like Lambda or Crusoe, but also gives it customer-concentration risk that public filings flag prominently.\n\nThe company reported $5.13 billion in 2025 revenue against a $1.2 billion net loss, reflecting the capital intensity of financing GPU fleets ahead of tenant ramp. Its 2025 acquisition of Weights & Biases for roughly $1.7 billion pushed CoreWeave up the stack from raw compute rental toward the MLOps tooling layer, followed by smaller tuck-ins of OpenPipe and Monolith AI. Positioning is unambiguously hyperscale and training-first: long-term reserved capacity contracts with a handful of the largest AI buyers, rather than the on-demand long-tail served by cheaper mid-market neoclouds.