Applied Digital (APLD) shares surged as high as 15% during morning market action on Thursday after its second quarter fiscal 2026 results topped estimates and the company revealed it was in advanced discussions to deploy 900 MW of data center capacity across three sites in the quarters ahead.
“Looking ahead, the company disclosed 900 MW across 3 sites in advanced discussions with different investment-grade hyperscalers, with groundbreaking on at least one new campus expected by the end of January,” said B. Riley Securities analysts Nick Giles and Fedor Shabalin in a Thursday investor note. “Additionally, management emphasized increasingly favorable contract terms and stable-to-improving pricing, and the company now expects to exceed its long-term $1B NOI target within five years.”
Applied Digital reported second-quarter revenue of $126.6M, which represented nearly a 100% year-over-year increase.
B. Riley reiterated its Buy rating and $47 price target on the stock.
Meanwhile, Needham also reiterated its Buy rating and $41 price target.
“APLD is spinning out its cloud compute segment in a business combination with EKSO, which will be called ChronoScale,” said Needham analysts, led by John Todaro in a note. “ChronoScale will look to sign data center capacity from third parties as well as APLD and generated ~$60m in trailing 12 months revenues.”
Finally, Roth reiterated its Buy rating and ‘top pick’ on the stock, and nudged its price target to $58 from $56.
“APLD mentioned it is in discussions with hyperscalers (that differ from its signed contracts) for at least three additional sites and ~900MWs,” said Roth analysts Darren Aftahi and Dillon Heslin in an investor note. “Given APLD has passed initial diligence with all these hyperscalers, and has begun development level work ($45M in the Macquarie dev. credit for land, groundwork, initial equipment), we believe another lease is waiting in the wings with high probability with another hyperscaler. The point is, we believe this initial spend and pre-lease funding is foreshadowing that another lease is coming for APLD.”
Applied Digital is one of several crypto mining companies that have transitioned to providing data center infrastructure for cloud, AI and high-performance computing. Others include CoreWeave (CRWV), Core Scientific (CORZ) and Hut 8 (HUT).
Share prices for these companies were up 1%, 0.3% and down 0.5%, respectively, by late morning trading on Thursday.