Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) kicked off its fiscal year with quite a statement. The company reported first-quarter results that blew past Wall Street’s expectations, as the global race to build out infrastructure for generative AI continues to fuel explosive growth across its data center operations.

Shares jumped as much as 28% in premarket trading Friday, extending what has already been a remarkable year… the stock is up 238% year-to-date, easily outpacing the S&P 500’s 14.5% gain.

For the quarter ended August 31, Applied Digital posted revenue of $64.2 million, topping analyst estimates of $50 million, according to LSEG data. That’s an 84% increase compared to the same period last year. Adjusted loss per share came in at 3 cents, far narrower than the 13-cent loss analysts expected.

Businesses are sprinting to scale next-generation AI models, and that’s translating into real money for data center operators like Applied Digital. Revenue from its Data Center Hosting segment hit $37.9 million during the quarter, as customers continue ramping up high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. CEO Wes Cummins highlighted that the company’s Polaris Forge 1 campus in North Dakota is now fully leased, following a new 150-megawatt expansion agreement with CoreWeave… one of the largest AI cloud providers in the U.S.

That new deal brings Applied Digital’s total contracted lease revenue to roughly $11 billion, including $7 billion from the initial two 15-year leases with CoreWeave announced earlier this year. Construction remains on schedule, supported by an initial $112.5 million draw from a $5 billion preferred equity facility with Macquarie Asset Management, which is funding much of the project’s build-out.

Applied Digital isn’t slowing down. The company recently broke ground on its Polaris Forge 2 campus, which will add another 200 megawatts of power when fully operational. Phase one is slated to come online in 2026, with full completion expected by 2027. To fund that next phase, Applied Digital secured $50 million from Macquarie Equipment Capital and raised another $200 million through an expanded Series G preferred stock offering.

Roth Capital recently noted that Applied Digital could land another HPC colocation deal by year-end, a sign that demand for dedicated AI compute infrastructure remains red-hot.

Applied Digital’s latest results reinforce its position at the center of the AI infrastructure boom. With record leasing activity, long-term revenue visibility through CoreWeave contracts, and new capacity already under construction, the company appears well-positioned to ride the wave of enterprise AI adoption through the decade. If execution continues at this pace, Applied Digital may soon graduate from being an upstart data center operator to one of the key enablers of the next AI supercycle.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.