How Applied Digital Secured $31 Billion and 1.2GW in Just One Year | The Tech Capital

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Well, how can you not love the city?

Yeah, you don't go hungry. Food's great. Beautiful. Right on the Med. They really pick nice locations for these data center conferences. So that's great. And then this conference, you know, in general, it's the premier global conference, right? I go to PTC in January. It's global, but it feels a lot more, you know, US-focused right now, but it's, you know, it's big. But this has grown so much in the last, you know, two years. This is my third time being here, but it's just grown so much. And you get a lot of interesting perspectives around the world, not just what we're doing in the US, which is what we get most of the time. But you get a European, you get an Asian, you even get an African perspective. So it's an interesting event to come to and, you know, learn about it. The other part of it is you get the full stack here, right? You get all the way, you know, down to the power suppliers, all the way up through software. So it's great. It's a great conference to attend.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's not what I spoke about on that conference is not necessarily something that people don't already know about, but you can split a lot of different technologies. There's a lot of different chip technologies. There's a lot of different cooling, you know, different ways to generate power, all of those pieces. When it comes to me, as the data center provider, you know, we've designed the data center that we build that is chip-agnostic for the most part. So we do GPU, XPU. So that's fine, and agnostic to the customers. We've made it extremely flexible from a customer perspective so that it really serves all of the, you know, six hyperscale customers that we target. And so if we'll serve those six, we'll probably serve, you know, almost any neo-cloud customer. But so there's that aspect from a chip technology, and then cooling, you know, you are down that. But the biggest one that we talk about internally is the move eventually, and when do you make this move and kind of how we plan for it, for 800-V delivery, right? And when you go to 800-V delivery, doing direct current delivery inside the data center from alternating current probably sounds, you know, a little bit boring. But that's kind of a bigger lift for us from the data center. And so that's really coming with the Vera Rubin Ultra, Kyber. So, you know, from a data center change perspective, that's probably the biggest leap we're really focused on kind of in the next 18, 24, 36 months.

For me, I've said this to several people. I think battery is going to become a much, much bigger part of the equation, both on grid, on-site battery for load balancing, for backup. So we're spending a lot of time on that. And so I think, you know, for investing for me is battery, cooling. We've made a cooling investment in what we think is a company called Corintis, a private company that we think is one of the leading direct-to-chip liquid cooling companies to make direct-to-chip more efficient. Why does that matter for me as a data center builder and operator? If I can leave the same equipment in place on the CDU side and the technology changes with the chip every single time we switch out the servers, but I don't have to change anything inside the data center. So we're investing pretty heavily in that as well.

Absolutely.

So we have 5 GW of pipeline. We have... So what a difference a year makes is so... 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, it felt like if we were talking about that size of a pipeline last year, like that seems a lot of pie in the sky. But after, you know, contracting the amount we have and kind of the momentum that we have, pretty excited about that. We have four campuses contracted total, three in North Dakota, one in Louisiana. And we're, you know, anticipating doing more in the coming months. And so, and then we have a model where we build, you know, two or 300 MW to start a campus. And then we think we can build that simultaneously across, you know, four, five, six, up to seven campuses. What we don't do is try to build a gigawatt on a single campus in a short period of time. I think that's really difficult. So we stay away from that. Really, it's trying to throw six or 7,000 people, you know, on a construction project is really difficult. So we've done, you know, this repeatable model where we have everything centralized in the company and then we hire, you know, 20 key positions at each individual campus and then we're able to spread this out. We've locked in supply chain. We have a repeatable design that again fits for almost any customer that we need so that we can just be really seamless in how we deploy, build, and operate these facilities. But it's gone extraordinarily well in the past year and I, you know, I'm hopeful that that momentum stays high.

So geographic diversity and customer diversity is super important to us. So we... and then what we've talked about publicly is, so we signed CoreWeave, that's been a great experience for us, right? They're a great company. They are one of the best, if not the best, at how quickly they deploy, operate equipment. They understand this market really well. So that was a really great first customer for us. And then we've signed what we've been able to say is we've signed two other investment-grade tenants. Right. And I've talked about an investment grade is Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, Google. Those are the five. So we signed two out of those five. We're focused on, like in the best case scenario, we get all six of those customers over time and that's definitely our goal. So we have three... in one year we have three out of those six. And so we'll definitely keep pushing for, you know, the other three out of those six. But definitely customer diversification, geographic diversification. So we went out of North Dakota. We're working in other states as well. Maybe eventually we'll go internationally, but we have so much going on in the US right now that we've started to look at that, but we're pretty focused in the states.