Applied Digital (APLD) is trading higher as the market continues to price in a major long-duration AI data center leasing win announced April 23, 2026: a new 15-year lease with a U.S.-based, investment-grade hyperscaler at the company’s Delta Forge 1 campus. The agreement is described as approximately $7.5 billion of total contracted value and covers 300 megawatts of critical IT load, pushing Applied Digital’s total contracted lease revenue to over $23 billion and lifting the share’s perceived revenue visibility.

The lease adds a third hyperscale tenant and shifts the contracted revenue mix toward higher-credit counterparties, with more than half of contracted revenue now backed by investment-grade customers. For a developer-operator building “AI factory” scale campuses, that combination—bigger backlog, longer duration, and stronger customer credit—can reduce perceived financing risk and support valuation even before the campus is operational.

Delta Forge 1 is still under construction, with initial operations not expected until mid-2027, so the core debate becomes execution: schedule, cost, and the path to delivering high-density AI/HPC capacity at scale. That gap between contract announcement and revenue start means the stock can remain volatile and highly sensitive to construction updates, financing terms, and any changes in hyperscaler demand.