Applied Digital completes second Ellendale building, adding 75MW for CoreWeave

Applied Digital has put the second phase of Building 2 into service at its Ellendale, North Dakota campus, adding 75MW of critical IT load across three 25MW data halls and taking Polaris Forge 1 to 250MW of operating capacity. CoreWeave has leased the whole site, so the 150MW still to be energised toward the campus's 400MW design is already committed.

Ready for service is the sector's shorthand for capacity that can accept a customer's load, and reaching it completes a 150MW building whose first phase went live in July, with each 25MW hall acting as the unit of delivery and every hall that reaches service adding capacity the tenant can occupy. With the first phase of Building 1 completed in December 2025, Ellendale has produced three rounds of capacity in about ten months. Wes Cummins, the chief executive and chairman, called the milestone a demonstration of the company's ability to turn large-scale power into operating AI infrastructure, adding that securing power is only where the job begins.

Polaris Forge 1 broke ground in September 2022 as part of Applied Digital's crypto and high-performance computing business, and all of its capacity is now set to be taken up by CoreWeave. The company, founded in 2021 as Applied Blockchain, has spent the years since signing large-scale deals with hyperscale customers; it still runs two cryptomining sites at Jamestown and Ellendale with some 286MW between them and recently spun off its cloud unit, ChronoScale.

ChronoScale, the cloud unit spun out recently, is where the operating evidence has been thinner: PWD's September coverage of the spin-out's 50MW liquid-cooled Nvidia plan found Microsoft in the partner role but not yet as a committed payer, which left duration, price and obligation unresolved. Ellendale runs that sequence in the other direction, with the lease in place before the second half of Building 2 was ready to take load.

The rest of the book is a set of sites whose counterparties are described by credit rather than by name.

Ellendale is one of five AI Factory campuses behind the 1.4GW of contracted critical IT load Applied Digital reports, alongside about 2.15GW of grid-connected utility power — two figures that do not measure the same thing, since one is capacity committed to tenants and the other is power secured at the meter. The two sites the company has sized publicly besides Ellendale, Polaris Forge 3 and Delta Forge 1 outside Alexandria, Louisiana, are each 430MW, while disclosure on Delta Forge 2 goes no further than the town it will sit near, Brookwood, Alabama.

Two of the five AI campuses sit in North Dakota, at Ellendale and Harwood, and so do both cryptomining sites; the Delta Forge build takes the company into Louisiana and Alabama. Company disclosures say nothing about permitting or local consent at any of them, leaving no evidence yet on whether those states will be easier or harder to build in than North Dakota.

Ellendale is the first clean test of the rule that governs compute leases: the anchor tenant sets the value of the asset, and the building is the mechanism that delivers it. Here the tenant is named, the campus is fully leased, and the halls are energised, which makes the CoreWeave contract revenue-producing rather than prospective. The unnamed campuses require more evidence. In September, Applied Digital priced local consent at its Alabama site at $270 million, roughly $13.5 million a year, with the tenant kept out of the document — the permission is public while the credit that decides what the site is worth is not. The reporting on CoreWeave's 15-year lease at a Niagara cryptomine described the tenant's contract stack as functioning collateral, and Ellendale puts the same counterparty on the other side of a lease that is now backed by capacity in service.

A similar logic applies to renewable and storage milestones, where a completion that names no buyer is a developer absorbing merchant risk. Ellendale is plainer: the buyer is named and the site is described as fully leased, so the milestone reports capacity that already has somewhere to go.

Behind Ellendale sits the rest of the book, and CoreWeave is the only counterparty the company names anywhere in the portfolio; the others are hyperscalers described by credit rating, or, at Delta Forge 2, not described at all. The company's own phrasing leans on the ratings rather than the names — "investment-grade" at Harwood, "high investment-grade" for the Louisiana site. For the four campuses still to come, the pattern has also been the reverse of Ellendale's: leases and pre-leases announced, with no completed construction reported at any of them.

That leaves 150MW still to deliver at Ellendale and four campuses behind it, with one counterparty named out of five. The ready-for-service notices still to come will show whether the rest arrive with names attached, or whether the disclosure stays at the level of credit rating.