Wes Cummins, CEO of Applied Digital (APLD), gives more insight into the deal his company and Coreweave (CRWV) recently signed. The company is building the data center facility in a town of 1,100 will offer 250 megawatts of power to Coreweave. Wes notes headwinds Applied Digital faced during the DeepSeek sell-off and how A.I. adoption has only accelerated since.
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Questions asked in this interview
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0:00But for those who, you know, maybe are living under a rock and aren't familiar with your company — I know it's getting harder and harder not to be if you're following AI — can you give us the elevator pitch of sort of what you guys do?
4:01... of the baseball innings — but when you look at this space, do you feel it is still relatively early stage in terms of continued AI buildout and ultimately where this entire, you know, I guess internet, you know, 2.0 AI is ultimately going?
7:06Despite maybe some of those concerns, are you seeing any signs that those companies are willing to tap the brake and risk perhaps falling behind some of their competitors?
Welcome back to Market on Close. I'm Alex Coffee. My pleasure to welcome in our next guest. It's the chairman and CEO of Applied Digital, Wes Cummins. Wes, thanks so much for taking the time and joining me here on this Tuesday afternoon. I know you've got exciting news and I can't wait to get to that. But for those who, you know, maybe are living under a rock and aren't familiar with your company — I know it's getting harder and harder not to be if you're following AI — can you give us the elevator pitch of sort of what you guys do?
Sure, and thanks for having me, Alex. So what we do is we build — we design, build and operate what we call next-generation digital infrastructure, and this is high-power-density data centers primarily that are really built to run AI workloads.
As someone who grew up in the Midwest — you know, born and raised in Nebraska — I see obviously the North Dakota data center is obviously a huge part of your recent announcement. Talk to us about this leasing deal that you just announced with CoreWeave, another really major player kind of in this grand ecosystem of AI buildout. I know you work closely with companies like Nvidia and AMD as well. Talk to us about this announcement and what it means for your company.
Yeah, so this announcement — 250 megawatts of critical IT load on our Ellendale, North Dakota campus. This is a campus that we started developing back in 2022, and we started building the current building in 2023. This lease includes two buildings on our campus. Total value around $7 billion for the first two buildings. There's an option on a third building that would increase that value up to $11 billion of that contract. And this is a 15-year contract. And this campus is really designed — it's purpose-built for AI infrastructure workloads. So this will be, you know, one of the largest campuses in America, with a lot of near-term power coming online.
So, Alex, for you from Nebraska, I'm from Idaho. We built this in a town of about 2,000 people. We really worked with the community there. A lot of renewable energy that oftentimes doesn't get used. So this is stranded power that we're putting to great use by running these AI workloads in a location where, you know, typically you don't see these types of jobs and this type of opportunity available. But it's one of the unique features of these workloads and where we can take it, which is to the source of power, rather than typically these things being deployed in population centers across the U.S. and across the world, actually.
And Wes, I imagine one of the draws to an area like that is that maybe land is of abundance. If you do plan additional expansions, which I'm sure is sort of in the roadmap, you'll be able to do so much easier than in maybe more urban communities that are sort of built out. Is that kind of the idea?
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Cummins, W. (2025, June 3). Applied Digital (APLD) CEO on CRWV Deal, Accelerating A.I. Adoption [Interview transcript]. Schwab Network. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2989684/
MLA
Wes Cummins. "Applied Digital (APLD) CEO on CRWV Deal, Accelerating A.I. Adoption." Schwab Network, 3 Jun. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2989684/.
BibTeX
@misc{cummins2025_2989684,
author = {Wes Cummins},
title = {Applied Digital (APLD) CEO on CRWV Deal, Accelerating A.I. Adoption},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Schwab Network. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2989684/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
