APBack of Napkin
Applied Digital Corp. APLD
The bet you're really making is that the AI boom keeps needing giant buildings full of power and cooling, and that Applied Digital, which builds those buildings and rents them to large cloud operators under long-term leases, gets them finished and filled. You are betting its leases, which the filing describes as contracts with investment-grade hyperscalers, keep paying while the company finishes building the capacity it has under development. Right now it looks busy but bleeds cash: revenue nearly tripled last year to $611 million while the operating loss widened to $236 million as the first campus came online. You pay a little over four times what the company is worth on paper and nothing for profit, because there isn't any yet, roughly the middle of its swings since 2022 and well below the seven-plus it fetched at its 2026 peak.
Key data
APLD · price with moving averages
Source: market data.
The business
Applied Digital builds power-dense data center campuses and rents them to companies that run AI. It is a landlord, not a cloud operator, and it chose to be: it sold off its own GPU-rental business and now leases finished buildings under long contracts. The flagship is Polaris Forge in Ellendale, North Dakota, where about 100 MW is operating and revenue-generating. Behind it sits a development pipeline of over 3 GW of utility power. The moat, such as it is, is holding land, executed utility power agreements and a repeatable build in the few places where hundreds of megawatts can actually be energized soon; power access, not technology, is the scarce thing. The tenant holds a warm hall of liquid-cooled racks. Applied Digital holds the dirt, the substation contract and the debt.
Inside the complete Back of Napkin
- 01The business
- 02The numbers
- 03Management
- 04How it fails or surprises you
- 05Closing thoughts
- 06Methodology
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