The CEO pivoted his company from Bitcoin mining to hyperscale data center development, targeting top-of-the-market players. Now, his company manages a $7 billion lease for an NVIDIA-backed company.
By Brian Richardson | July 7, 2025|11:00 pm
For more than 20 years, Applied Digital didn’t have much of a direction, CEO Wes Cummins admits. The company had multiple names and bounced between industries, providing services ranging from staffing for films to developing flight training technology. After a two-year stint in Bitcoin mining facilities, Applied Digital found its niche in 2023: building high-powered data centers during this new era of artificial intelligence.
The company recently signed its first lease. Applied Digital is leasing two data centers to NVIDIA-backed AI startup CoreWeave, receiving $7 billion for a 15-year lease. It’s not NVIDIA’s first foray into business with Applied Digital: In 2024, the company acquired a significant number of Applied Digital shares, which are now worth more than $60 million.
Both facilities are in Ellendale, North Dakota. The first building, which will begin operations for CoreWeave in the fourth quarter of 2025, has the power to consume 100 megawatts of energy at any given moment. The second building, slated to open in June 2026, has a 150-megawatt capacity. Applied Digital’s stock rose more than 100 percent in the week following the deal—and is currently trading at around $10 a share.
The leases are expected to generate nearly $500 million in annual revenue, which translates to over $300 million in net operating income per year, Cummins said. That’s up from the $200 million in annual revenue projected for its fiscal year, which ended May 31, 2025 (the official earnings report has yet to be released).
Applied Digital is taking a gamble on an industry that is rapidly evolving. “There’s going to be a massive amount of demand for this type of high-powered density, intensive cooling, and super-efficient data center over the next 20 to 30 years,” Cummins said.
Cummins recently spoke with D CEO about his company’s first lease, its partnership with NVIDIA, and what he has planned for the future.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
D CEO: What made you pivot the company from Bitcoin and cloud services to artificial intelligence?
Cummins: “When ChatGPT debuted in December 2022, we were running a small cloud service out of our facility in North Dakota for GPUs, serving mostly universities and their research. And as we moved into 2023, the market changed dramatically. I went back to our data center development team and said, ‘Guys, I know we were going to do five and 10 megawatt builds. We need to go back to building hundreds of megawatts. This market has changed dramatically.’ So, we designed something on a much larger scale. We worked with NVIDIA’s data center design team in 2023 because this was really designed around NVIDIA hardware. That’s where we made our bet. We thought NVIDIA would continue to win in this market. And so, we just helped develop their roadmap.”
D CEO: Why did you choose Ellendale, North Dakota, as the site for Applied Digital’s data center campus?
Wes Cummins: “It’s fairly remote, but it has all the ingredients we thought we needed. Large amounts of power, great fiber connectivity, and it’s a cold location. We can do some really unique things on cooling to increase the efficiency ofthe facility. That’s why we started building a speculative $1.2 billion building in a town without a McDonald’s.”
D CEO: Were you expecting the stock to jump following the deal’s announcement? And how are you adapting to rapid growth?
Cummins: “We’ve invested $1 billion in that site so far, and we’re going to invest more, but we haven’t seen any revenue from that. That’ll start in the October-November time frame. But this is going to be a big step up. And then the second building will turn on in June of next year. Another big step up. I can never say what stock moves mean, but it was certainly validation. That contract was validation of our risk-taking and strategy to go out and build this without having a customer.”
D CEO: How would you characterize the current AI climate?
Cummins: “Right now, the AI market is an arms race. And it’s all about compute capacity. And the more computing capacity Open AI has, Anthropic has, or Microsoft has, is the most important aspect for these developers. NVIDIA has really pioneered this market. Everyone gets so focused on this chip. But it’s the overall architecture that makes NVIDIA the pioneers of the market. It’s the GPU. It’s the networking architecture that is also owned by NVIDIA. Then it’s the CUDA software—which allows computers to use their specialized and high-powered GPU chips for general computing—that sits on top.”
D CEO: Do you see a future for Applied Digital outside of the NVIDIA umbrella?
Cummins: “NVIDIA is the leader in hardware. I believe they remain the leader for the foreseeable future. But different types of chip architects are trying to get into this market now. The data center requirement is going to be very similar regardless. It’s going to require the same power density, the same cooling and networking inside, whether that’s an NVIDIA product, whether that’s an AMD product, whether it’s a new application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that hits the market; they’re all going to require a very similar digital infrastructure. It’s not that NVIDIA has to win for Applied Digital to win.”
D CEO: What is the path forward after spending the past two and a half years working on the site and finding your first tenant?
Cummins: “Zero to one is the hardest. And now I think it’ll be easier to get that second customer, a third customer, a fourth customer. I think it’s going to be an easier road for us now. We just have to keep accelerating.”
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