Utilized Digital has signed a landmark lease settlement with a U.S.-based investment-grade hyperscaler for its Polaris Forge 2 campus, at the moment beneath development close to Harwood, North Dakota. The deal, valued at roughly $5 billion in complete contracted income over a 15-year time period, secures 200 megawatts (MW) of devoted IT load designed to assist superior synthetic intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.
The hyperscaler additionally holds a primary proper of refusal for an extra 800 MW, positioning the complete 1-gigawatt (GW) Polaris Forge 2 campus for potential growth.
With this new lease, Utilized Digital now has a mixed complete of 600 MW contracted throughout its two North Dakota campuses – Polaris Forge 1 and a pair of – each serving two of the world’s largest hyperscalers. The announcement reinforces Utilized Digital’s rising standing as some of the quickly scaling builders of AI infrastructure in the US, as hyperscale cloud and AI demand drive unprecedented funding in compute energy and power capability.
“What units us aside isn’t simply the scale of our pipeline – it’s how briskly we will ship,” mentioned Wes Cummins, Chairman and CEO of Applied Digital. “Execution is the true constraint on this trade, and our staff continues to indicate that large-scale, next-generation knowledge facilities could be designed, financed, and constructed sooner and extra effectively than anybody thought doable. Polaris Forge 2 represents that very same momentum, and it underscores each our partnerships and our function in reshaping the AI infrastructure panorama.”
The 900-acre Polaris Forge 2 campus is engineered for prime effectivity and sustainability, focusing on an influence utilization effectiveness (PUE) of 1.18 and near-zero water consumption. Its first two buildings, totaling 200 MW, are anticipated to start coming on-line in 2026, reaching full deployment in 2027. The design incorporates liquid cooling techniques and different high-density energy options, enabling the campus to deal with the compute calls for of AI and HPC workloads at scale whereas minimizing environmental influence.
Utilized Digital’s Improvement Mannequin
The settlement marks one other milestone in what has been a 12 months of file growth for Applied Digital. Earlier in 2025, the corporate introduced a 150 MW lease with CoreWeave at its Polaris Forge 1 facility, a $5 billion AI infrastructure partnership with Macquarie Asset Administration, and a sequence of awards recognizing each its innovation and group influence. The corporate was not too long ago ranked first on the Dallas Enterprise Journal’s “Quick 50” checklist, reflecting its speedy development and rising management in digital infrastructure.
Applied Digital’s growth mannequin – described internally as “Totally different by Design” – emphasizes pace, sustainability, and regional optimization. Its amenities are strategically constructed within the U.S. heartland, leveraging inexpensive power, favorable local weather situations, and scalable land sources to assist AI infrastructure growth.
“Our AI factories are redefining how and the place hyperscale infrastructure will get constructed,” added Wes Cummins. “We’re proving that the following chapter of AI computing could be powered from the heartland – constructed responsibly, delivered rapidly, and designed for the intelligence period.”
