U.S. Applied Digital Signs $5.2 Billion AI Data Center Lease Agreement

en.Wedoany.com Reported - Recently, U.S. digital infrastructure company Applied Digital signed a 15-year lease agreement with a U.S. investment-grade hyperscale customer, with a base contract revenue of approximately $5.2 billion. The agreement covers 210MW of critical IT load at the Delta Forge 2 AI Factory campus, adopting a "take-or-pay" structure. If the customer exercises all renewal options, the total revenue over 30 years could reach approximately $12.7 billion.

The core value of this agreement lies in shifting AI data center construction from a "build first, wait for customers" model to a more certain long-term capacity lock-in. Hyperscale customers need to pre-book large-scale computing rooms, power capacity, cooling systems, and network resources to support future model training, inference services, and cloud-based AI application growth. Through the long-term lease model, Applied Digital first secures customer commitments, then organizes project pacing around campus construction, financing, power supply, and delivery. Delta Forge 2 also becomes the fifth campus under the company's AI Factory model, extending its data center portfolio from northern markets to new regions in the southern United States.

The project is expected to begin initial operations in the first quarter of 2028 and will adopt an infrastructure design suitable for high-power-density AI workloads, including waterless cooling technology and high-density computing support capabilities. For AI data centers, power and heat dissipation have become core conditions determining whether a project can be delivered on schedule; simply having server room space is insufficient to meet GPU cluster deployment needs.

Applied Digital has now formed an AI Factory portfolio covering five campuses, totaling approximately 1.4GW of critical IT load, and possesses about 2.15GW of grid-connected power resources. Following the new agreement, the company's base-period committed lease revenue has risen to approximately $36 billion, with potential revenue reaching about $86 billion if all renewal options are exercised. Approximately 70% of the contracted revenue comes from U.S. investment-grade hyperscale customers, indicating that the AI infrastructure market is forming a higher-certainty project development model through long-term leases, capital financing, and power resource binding. For cloud service providers and model companies, such arrangements allow for early lock-in of future computing capacity; for data center developers, long-term contracts help reduce financing difficulty and support larger-scale construction.

Such transactions will continue to drive demand in the information and communication technology supply chain. AI data center construction requires coordinated delivery of servers, power systems, liquid or waterless cooling equipment, fiber optic networks, high-speed switches, optical modules, rack integration, monitoring systems, and operations platforms. Subsequent focus points include the construction progress of the Delta Forge 2 campus, customer equipment deployment arrangements, the operational performance of the waterless cooling solution, and whether Applied Digital can initiate initial operations as planned in 2028. If the project proceeds smoothly, the U.S. AI data center market will continue to evolve toward a "long-term lease + large-scale power + high-density campus" model, further strengthening the core position of data centers in AI industry infrastructure.

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