Applied Digital Corporation (APLD) Stock Price & How to Invest

Applied Digital designs, builds, and operates data centers for artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and related workloads. It makes money primarily by leasing critical IT capacity (measured in megawatts of power) to compute customers under long-term contracts, plus a legacy data-center hosting segment. The economics resemble those of a specialized real-estate or infrastructure landlord: the company spends heavily up front to secure power, land, and buildings, then earns recurring rent over multi-year lease terms. Its flagship Polaris Forge 1 campus in Ellendale, North Dakota is engineered to scale up to roughly a gigawatt over time, with a second campus broken ground more recently.

The company began as a Bitcoin and crypto hosting operator before pivoting toward AI and HPC infrastructure as that demand surged. A defining step came in 2025, when its board approved selling the Cloud Services Business (which had supplied GPU cloud compute directly) because that segment was viewed as competing with the very data-center customers Applied Digital wanted to attract, and because focusing on a leasing or REIT-style model better fit its long-term direction. Around the same time it signed initial roughly 15-year leases with CoreWeave that, together with later expansions, lifted anticipated contracted lease revenue into the billions and then tens of billions of dollars as additional campuses were added.

The model is extraordinarily capital-intensive: building gigawatt-scale capacity requires continuous debt and equity financing, and Applied Digital has carried billions in debt while pricing large senior secured note offerings to fund expansion, which raises interest costs and dilution or leverage risk. Revenue is heavily concentrated on CoreWeave, so any change in that tenant's health, demand, or willingness to expand would matter disproportionately. Execution risk is real because leases only pay once buildings are energized and operational, and delays in power, construction, or supply chains push out cash flows. The company has reported sizable net losses, and the shares have been highly volatile, swinging on lease announcements, financing news, and broader AI-sector sentiment.

A simple financial snapshot. These are approximations and refresh quarterly; for current figures see Applied Digital Corporation's investor relations page or your broker.

• Revenue (trailing 12 months): ~$319 million
• Most recent quarter revenue: ~$127 million (up ~139% year over year)
• Net loss (most recent quarter, to common): ~$101 million (~$0.36 per share)
• Contracted lease backlog: Reported in the tens of billions; CoreWeave expanded to full 400MW at Polaris Forge 1
• Total debt: ~$2.7 billion (with ~$2.1 billion cash) as of fiscal Q3 2026
• Market capitalization: Roughly $11 billion range (varies with a volatile share price)

Applied Digital is still reporting net losses while it builds capacity, so traditional earnings multiples do not apply cleanly and much of the story sits in the contracted backlog rather than current profit. Figures are approximate and tied to the asOf date; revenue, losses, debt, and market cap move with each financing, lease, and earnings update. Investors generally weigh the long-dated lease backlog against the heavy ongoing capex and financing needed to deliver it.

There are three common ways to get APLD exposure. Buy shares (or fractional shares) directly at any major broker. Hold an ETF that includes it, which spreads the position across many companies. Or build it into a focused thematic basket, so APLD sits alongside other stocks that express the same thesis.

Walnut takes the basket route. Describe a thesis where APLD fits (for example “AI infrastructure” or “dividend-growth large-caps”) and the AI proposes 5 to 6 constituents with target weights. You review the plan and fund it through your own broker when you're ready.

Applied Digital today is a developer and operator of AI-focused data centers that leases critical IT capacity to compute customers, with CoreWeave as its marquee anchor tenant. The main driver is contracted lease capacity at its Polaris Forge campuses in Ellendale, North Dakota, where CoreWeave has expanded to the full 400MW at Polaris Forge 1 and the company has broken ground on a second campus scalable toward a gigawatt. If you believe AI compute demand keeps outrunning available power and data-center supply, the question becomes sizing and overlap with what you already own, not timing; the risk is that the model runs on heavy ongoing capex and financing, the revenue concentration on CoreWeave is high, and the stock has been very volatile.

Whether APLD is worth buying today depends more on your time horizon and what you already hold than on any single call. We walk through valuation, what would have to go right, and the risks in is APLD a buy?, and where the stock could go from here in the APLD stock forecast.

For income investors, whether APLD pays a dividend and how the payout looks is covered in does APLD pay a dividend?