Applied Digital x Soluna (Project Dorothy 3 JV)

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.

Soluna Holdings designs, develops and operates data centres co-located with wind, solar or hydroelectric plants, using surplus renewable power for workloads such as Bitcoin mining and generative AI.