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Wes Cummins

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Applied Digital

Search every verified Wes Cummins interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Wes Cummins, chairman and CEO of Applied Digital, discussed the company’s fiscal first quarter 2027 results during an October 2026 conference call. He described North Dakota as an attractive market for data center development, citing its power availability, climate, and a state framework that provides clear expectations for permitting. Cummins noted that Applied Digital already has three customers in the state, that a tier-one hyperscaler is building a roughly one-gigawatt project there, and that the company is in conversations with other hyperscalers for additional capacity. Cummins also addressed industry challenges, stating that local moratoriums, tighter zoning, and longer permitting timelines in some markets could increase the strategic value of Applied Digital’s existing powered and operating campuses. He said demand for data center capacity remains “extremely robust,” with most 2027 capacity already contracted and significant demand extending into 2028 and 2029. In response to a question about smaller builds, he indicated that modular or prefabricated solutions of 20 to 50 megawatts are being considered as a way to secure capacity for the company’s Chronoscale business.

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I feel like there's a lot of misinformation, but we have this discussion in the data center industry quite a bit about education and the benefits that data centers bring to the places that they're built. And it's hard to capture that on a national level. Everyone's really focused on just 20-second sound bites that we all get stuck to on TikTok or Instagram. So the approach we take is we have a community approach. And”

“We have 5 GW of pipeline. We have... what a difference a year makes. At this conference last year, we signed our first contract. We're back here this year. So, a year later, in that time frame, we've signed 1.2 GW of contracted capacity, 31 billion of contracted revenue baseline revenue over the next 15 years. And we just feel like we have a lot of momentum. We have an extended pipeline of north of 5 GW, but you know”

“So, I was around for that. It was kind of how I got introduced into the investment world. And let me tell you what I see as the big difference between the two. So, the fiber build, you know, we're probably all happy that that happened because that enabled the entire digital economy that we have now. But when they built the fiber, there was not the applications to fill up the fiber to make it used. And then they neede”

“So, I call us a highly technical landlord. What we do is we go, we have our sites, so we secure the power, we get the permitting, and then typically we'll start to do some of the build process right, dirt work, get the foundations moving, all of that, pretty low cost. And then what we like at this point, you know, I built that first data center on spec, I don't want to do that again, but what we do is get the site bu”

“The way we ensure that it really starts with how we pick the location. So, we pick the location by is excess power available is how we've done it in the past. So, take for example our Ellendale our first location at Ellendale, North Dakota. Polaris Forge 1 is what we call that. That location we're there because 2 GW of wind power feed into a substation. And when the wind is blowing, there's typically not enough trans”

“When you look at power generation over the near term, let's even call it medium term, eventually we have to get to nuclear power generation but it's just not going to come in the time frame that we need it and kind of the AI landscape at large needs it. So the solution for that right now is going to be natural gas. We happen to be located in North Dakota. North Dakota to me is a cold version of Texas. We have the Bak”

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