Applied Digital Corporation has signed a new long-term lease agreement at Delta Forge 2, a purpose-built AI Factory campus located in an undisclosed southern state, with a U.S.- based high-investment-grade hyperscaler.

The agreement marks the company's fifth AI Factory campus and its third long-term lease with the same unnamed hyperscaler, bringing the Dallas-headquartered company's total contracted base-term lease revenue to approximately USD 36 billion.

Deal Terms and Financial Scope

The lease covers 210 megawatts of critical IT load under a 15-year take-or-pay structure with renewal options.

The base-term contracted revenue associated with the agreement stands at approximately USD 5.2 billion. If all renewal options are exercised over a 30-year total term, that figure rises to approximately USD 12.7 billion.

The new agreement pushes Applied Digital's total contracted portfolio across its five AI Factory campuses to 1.4 gigawatts of critical IT load and approximately 2.15 gigawatts of gross grid-connected utility power.

Total contracted base-term lease revenue across the full portfolio now sits at approximately USD 36 billion, or approximately USD 86 billion if all renewal options across the portfolio are exercised.

Approximately 70 percent of that contracted revenue is backed by U.S. based investment-grade hyperscalers. Initial operations at Delta Forge 2 are anticipated to commence in the first quarter of 2028.

The Franchise Model Behind the Expansion

Applied Digital Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Wes Cummins described the expansion as validation of what the company calls its franchise model, a strategy centered on replicating a core team of design, construction, and operations professionals across every campus in every market.

"Two years ago, we made a deliberate decision to build a company that scales, not just builds data centers," Cummins said.

"Continued demand from leading hyperscalers across five campuses is strong validation of our model." The franchise model is now described as active across both northern and southern geographies, with Delta Forge 2 representing the company's entry into a new southern state location.

Applied Digital did not disclose the specific state in its announcement.

The company was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It has been recognized as the Best Data Center in the Americas 2025 by Datacloud.

Campus Infrastructure and Technology

Delta Forge 2 is purpose-built for large-scale AI training and inference workloads. The campus incorporates Applied Digital's proprietary waterless cooling technology alongside high-power-density infrastructure designed to meet the compute densities required by modern AI operations.

The integration of waterless cooling across Applied Digital's campuses is a recurring feature of its infrastructure design, positioned by the company as a distinguishing technical and sustainability characteristic of its build approach.

Site Selection and Community Impact

Applied Digital's site selection strategy, as described by the company, prioritizes communities where large-scale, long-duration infrastructure investment is expected to create meaningful local economic impact.

The company cited local employment, an expanded tax base, and sustained economic activity over the life of each project as the primary criteria informing where it chooses to build.

Cummins addressed this philosophy directly in the announcement.

"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," he said.

"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 local employment and construction activity to its host community, though the company did not provide specific figures for job creation or economic investment in the press release.

Applied Digital operates a documentary series titled Behind the Build, which it describes as a ground-level look at how it constructs its AI Factory campuses alongside host communities.

Hyperscaler Relationships and Portfolio Concentration

The Delta Forge 2 lease marks Applied Digital's third agreement with the same U.S. based investment-grade hyperscaler, whose identity was not disclosed.

The concentration of repeat business with a single unnamed hyperscaler across multiple campuses underscores the company's reliance on a small number of large counterparties.

With approximately 70 percent of contracted revenue now backed by U.S. based investment-grade hyperscalers, the company's revenue base is heavily weighted toward a segment of the market defined by high credit quality and large-scale compute demand.

Applied Digital designs, builds, and operates high-performance data centers and colocation services for artificial intelligence, cloud, networking, and blockchain workloads.

The company combines hyperscale expertise with rapid deployment capabilities and describes its mission as delivering scalable compute while creating economic opportunities in underserved communities through its AI Factory franchise model.