Applied Digital Lands 300MW Hyperscale Lease at Louisiana Campus in $7.5 Billion Deal
April 23, 2026
Applied Digital, a developer of data centers for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining, has secured a major new tenant for its Delta Forge 1 campus in Louisiana, marking another step in the company’s aggressive expansion into hyperscale computing infrastructure. The deal underscores the surging demand for large-scale data center capacity driven by AI workloads, particularly in the southern United States.
The company announced this week that it has entered into a lease agreement with a U.S.-based, high investment-grade hyperscaler for its 430MW Delta Forge 1 facility. The agreement covers two 15-year leases totaling 300MW of IT load, with a combined value of approximately $7.5 billion. The leases span two buildings on the campus and include three five-year renewal options.
“We remain focused on delivering operational AI capacity at scale,” said Wes Cummins, chairman and CEO of Applied Digital. “With this agreement, we now have two US-based investment-grade hyperscalers across our portfolio, marking an important step in the continued diversification of our customer base and strengthening the overall quality and visibility of our contracted revenue. Our priority remains execution – bringing capacity online on schedule and operating it with discipline over the long term.”
Applied Digital broke ground on Delta Forge 1 in January. While the company had previously not disclosed the exact location beyond noting it was in a “strategic southern US market,” an April investor presentation identifies the site as Alexandria, Louisiana. Initial operations at the campus are expected to commence in mid-2027, with the first phase consisting of two 150MW buildings situated on approximately 500 acres.
This marks the third hyperscale tenant Applied Digital has secured across its portfolio. The company now has 900MW of leases signed, with 1GW of total capacity under development across three sites. Its other hyperscale campuses include Polaris Forge 1 and 2 in Ellendale and Harwood, North Dakota. The former is set to be leased to CoreWeave, while much of the latter is leased to an unnamed investment-grade hyperscaler. In Louisiana, major tech firms such as Meta and Amazon are known to be developing data center projects, with Amazon partnering with Stack, while Hut 8, another crypto firm pivoting to AI, is also active in the state.
Founded in 2021 as Applied Blockchain, the Nasdaq-listed company still operates two crypto mining sites in Jamestown and Ellendale, North Dakota, totaling around 286MW. Applied Digital does not mine Bitcoin itself but traditionally hosts hardware for other crypto mining firms. Like many in the sector, the company is undergoing a major pivot toward hosting high-performance computing and AI hardware, driven by massive demand for available capacity. Applied is also offering its own cloud services, though it is spinning that business out into a separate entity.
In the same announcement, Applied Digital said it expects to secure up to $300 million in a senior secured bridge facility to fund continued development of the 150MW Building 3 data center at its Polaris Forge 1 campus. The company also anticipates securing up to $300 million in a senior secured revolving credit facility to fund pre-lease and post-lease development activities across its platform, as well as general working capital needs and transaction expenses. Applied had previously targeted a new campus in South Dakota but appears to have cooled its interest in that development.
Source: datacenterdynamics
