Remember when your crypto-mining buddy kept talking about Applied Digital (APLD)? Well, turns out they weren’t completely wrong for once. This company just pulled off the kind of earnings beat that makes you wonder if someone accidentally added an extra zero somewhere.
APLD stock is up a casual 587% in six months. Yeah, you read that right. Five hundred and eighty-seven percent. That’s the kind of number that makes you question every life choice that led to not buying this stock earlier.
Here’s what happened: Applied Digital used to be just another crypto mining company (remember when everyone was doing that?). But they smartly pivoted to AI infrastructure right when everyone realized we need massive data centers to power all these chatbots that can write your emails for you.
The numbers from their latest quarter are honestly ridiculous. Revenue jumped 84% year-over-year to $64.2 million. Analysts were expecting them to lose 13 cents per share – instead, they only lost 3 cents. In Wall Street math, that’s basically like winning the lottery.
But here’s where it gets interesting. They just expanded their deal with CoreWeave (think of them as the cool kids building AI infrastructure) by another 150 megawatts. Their prospective lease revenue is now sitting at $11 billion. That’s billion with a ‘B.’ Their Polaris Forge 1 data center is fully booked, and they’re talking about expanding to 1 gigawatt by 2030.
To put that in perspective: a gigawatt could power about 750,000 homes. These guys are basically building the electrical backbone for our AI-powered future, one massive data center at a time.
The stock hit $39 recently before pulling back to around $34. But here’s the thing – if they keep landing these big contracts, $50 by year-end isn’t crazy talk. The company wants to hit $1 billion in net operating income within five years, and at this rate, they might get there faster than a Tesla in ludicrous mode.
Look, I’m not saying mortgage your house for APLD stock (please don’t do that). But when a company successfully pivots from the wild west of crypto mining to becoming essential infrastructure for the AI boom, and then proceeds to absolutely demolish earnings expectations… well, that’s worth paying attention to.
The AI revolution needs massive computing power, and someone has to build and run those data centers. Applied Digital seems to have figured out how to be that someone, and they’re getting paid handsomely for it.
Could it hit $100 next year? In this market, stranger things have happened. Just ask anyone who bought NVIDIA before the AI craze hit.