CoreWeave signs megalease at Applied Digital's not-so-little house on the prairie

A big win for North Dakota

CoreWeave is headed to North Dakota, where the rent-a-GPU outfit has signed two roughly 15-year lease agreements with Applied Digital for 250 megawatts of capacity, which the datacenter builder expects will generate around $7 billion in revenue.

Located in Ellendale, North Dakota, Applied Digital's datacenter was built specifically to support large-scale AI and high-performance compute workloads.

CoreWeave is set to be the facility's biggest tenant, claiming more than 60 percent of the 400 MW of capacity currently planned for the campus. As things stand, only about 100 megawatts of that capacity will be ready for CoreWeave this year. By our estimate, that's enough capacity for around 48,000 of Nvidia's fastest Blackwell GPUs.

The remaining 150 MW of capacity won't be available until work on Applied Digital's second data hall is finished sometime in mid-2026 — just in time for Nvidia's next-gen Vera-Rubin family of accelerators, teased at GTC this spring.

But CoreWeave could end up renting out the entire thing.

According to Applied, CoreWeave holds an option to lease an additional 150 MW of capacity in a third data hall, which is currently in the planning stages and anticipated to be ready for service in 2027. And while the Ellendale campus is designed to support up to 400 MW of compute, Applied said in a release that it's got more than a gigawatt of power capacity "under various stages of load study."

The contract represents a win for Applied Digital as it made the switch from crypto farming to an HPC-centric real-estate investment trust (REIT).

"These leases solidify Applied Digital's position as an emerging provider of infrastructure critical to the next generation of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing," Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins said in a canned statement.

The announcement comes just months after Macquarie, one of Australia's top financial services firms, decided to get in on the AI gold rush by financing the datacenter upstart's expansion to the tune of $5 billion. In exchange Macquarie claimed a 15 percent stake in Applied's DC biz.

By outsourcing datacenter buildouts to colocation providers and REITs like Applied, CoreWeave can avoid many of the headaches associated with powering and cooling large-scale AI deployments, and instead focus on helping a growing number of hyperscale, cloud, and AI partners outsource their own compute needs.

During its Q1 earnings call last month, CoreWeave revealed it'd added OpenAI to its list of customers, which already includes Microsoft, Google, and IBM to name a handful. The model dev is expected to add $11.2 billion to CoreWeave's revenue backlog.

The agreement is also a big win for the state of North Dakota, the 47th largest in the US by population, which was a big beneficiary of the fracking-driven oil boom in the earlier part of the 21st century. Former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum - a long-ago software exec whose accounting software company, Great Plains, was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 - is now Donald Trump's secretary of the Interior, where he's pursuing a strategy of US energy independence through increased exploration for energy sources on federal land. ®