TLDR
- Fiscal Q1 revenue climbed 322% year-over-year to $341.9 million, far ahead of Wall Street’s roughly $134 million estimate.
- APLD shares dropped nearly 6% in regular trading Wednesday, then flipped to a gain of about 4% after hours.
- The GAAP net loss grew to $221 million, or $0.76 per share, though the adjusted loss of just $0.01 per share beat forecasts for a $0.26 loss.
- The company’s contracted data center pipeline now stands at 1.41 gigawatts across five campuses, worth close to $36 billion in future revenue.
- Applied Digital is pushing into Finland and linked up with Microsoft through its ChronoScale unit, while analysts keep a Strong Buy rating and a $60.07 average price target.
Applied Digital had a rocky Wednesday that ended on a high note. Shares slid close to 6% during the regular session, then turned around and gained about 4% in after-hours trading once the company’s fiscal first-quarter numbers came out.
Revenue was the standout figure. It reached $341.9 million, a jump of 322% from $80.9 million a year earlier.
That result crushed Wall Street’s forecast of roughly $134 million. Few analysts had modeled growth of this scale.
The profit picture tells a different story. Net loss attributable to common stockholders grew to $221 million, or $0.76 per share, up from $18.5 million, or $0.07 per share, in the same quarter last year.
Strip out one-time items, though, and the adjusted loss was only $0.01 per share. That topped expectations calling for a $0.26 loss.
Costs climbed too. Total expenses hit $404.3 million, up from $90.7 million a year earlier, driven by spending to prepare new data centers, rising stock-based compensation, and higher interest costs.
HPC Hosting, the unit that leases out high-performance computing power, generated $262.6 million for the quarter. It’s quickly turning into the company’s main growth engine.
Applied Digital closed out August with $3.7 billion in cash and restricted cash on hand. Debt stood at $6.4 billion.
CEO Wes Cummins described the strategy as building “for the long term,” citing large-scale AI campuses and deals with top-tier hyperscale partners.
Expanding the Data Center Footprint
The company’s contracted pipeline now totals 1.41 gigawatts of critical IT load spread across five campuses. That adds up to nearly $36 billion in locked-in revenue over the length of those contracts.
At its Polaris Forge 1 site in North Dakota, Applied Digital brought another 75 megawatts online in July, then added a second 75-megawatt phase after the quarter wrapped. That puts operational capacity there at 250 megawatts.
Polaris Forge 2 is expected to start contributing soon too, which would lift total North Dakota capacity to 300 megawatts before the year is out.
New Territory and Fresh Partnerships
For the first time, Applied Digital is looking past U.S. borders. It recently locked in access to as much as one gigawatt of potential power capacity in Finland.
Domestically, it signed a power purchase agreement connected to a planned 1,200-megawatt natural gas plant in North Dakota, adding another electricity source for upcoming builds.
ChronoScale, the cloud arm Applied Digital still controls roughly 96% of, revealed a partnership with Microsoft for a 50-megawatt AI compute buildout running on Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems.
Analysts remain bullish overall. Among 9 covering APLD over the past three months, 7 rate it a buy and 2 stay neutral, landing on a Strong Buy consensus.
The average price target of $60.07 points to roughly 152% upside from Wednesday’s closing price.
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