Applied Digital prices Tuscaloosa consent at $270m, tenant still unnamed

Applied Digital has now told Tuscaloosa County what it is building and told the market almost nothing about who will pay for it. The $3.2 billion Delta Forge 2 campus will sit on 1,300 acres near Brookwood, Alabama — a 210MW data center, 1.2 million square feet at full build-out, operations expected to begin in 2028 — and a customer that signed for the capacity in June but is still described by the company only as an "investment grade hyperscaler."

The $270 million community benefits commitment to the Tuscaloosa County Economic Development Authority spreads over twenty years at $13.5 million a year, paid for local consent. The estimated $131 million in tax revenue for the area arrives with no term attached, leaving only one of the two commitments with a clock.

Applied ran the deal in the order a supply-constrained market produces: in June it announced a customer for a new 210MW data center without saying where the building would go, and in September it named the place. Buying land after the lease says something about which half of an AI campus build is now the hard one. EcoDataCenter took a 150MW site in Dalarna ahead of its permits, a wager on municipal consent as much as on megawatts; Applied has priced the same wager and agreed to pay it in twenty installments.

Spread undiscounted across two decades, that commitment works out to about 8% of the project's headline cost. Set $13.5 million a year against the cost of one year of delay on a $3.2 billion asset and the package reads less like philanthropy than like schedule insurance; in a county counting 1,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent ones, it may also be the cheapest capital available.

Brookwood's mayor, Joe Barger, framed the arrangement in the future tense: "We anticipate that Applied Digital will be a good neighbor and a long-term community partner," he said, with the town expecting the investment "to benefit Brookwood residents for generations to come." Wes Cummins, Applied's chairman and CEO, offered the company's version — Delta Forge 2 "reflects the model we are building across Applied Digital — repeatable AI infrastructure delivered at scale and built for the long term," with the company partnering in communities "where our investment genuinely matters." Both men are describing a relationship that has been priced ahead of being performed.

Delta Forge 2 is one of five AI Factory campuses in Applied's contracted portfolio, which the company now sizes at 1.4GW of critical IT load against roughly 2.15GW of grid-connected utility power. The 750MW between those figures is either the runway for the next set of leases or a carrying cost on interconnection rights Applied holds whether or not a tenant appears. Polaris Forge 1 and 2 are in Ellendale and Harwood, North Dakota, and Polaris Forge 3 will offer 300MW on 600 acres in an unnamed northern state, with initial operations anticipated in August 2027.

Applied, founded in 2021 as Applied Blockchain and since converted toward AI and HPC development, is selling capacity on this project at about $15 million a megawatt; across 1.2 million square feet and 100 permanent roles, that is one employee for every 12,000 square feet, the profile of an asset that is mostly electrical equipment and a small shift roster.

Of those five campuses, one has a named offtaker: Polaris Forge 1 is set to be leased to CoreWeave. Much of Polaris Forge 2 is headed to an unnamed investment-grade hyperscaler, Polaris Forge 3 to the same US-based, high-investment-grade counterparty that signed at Delta Forge 1, and Delta Forge 2 to a tenant Applied identifies only by its rating band. Whether those unnamed buyers are one firm or several is not disclosed, and the answer determines how concentrated the credit behind the portfolio actually is.

A lease is a credit instrument before it is a building; the same cash flow from a named hyperscaler and from a counterparty described as investment grade do not clear at the same discount rate, and where the name is missing the market can only underwrite the tenant at the developer's own cost of capital. That is the edge of the argument that only anchor-contracted digital assets earn infrastructure pricing — Applied has anchors, 1.4GW of them, while still unable to show the credit behind most of the book. In September, Theseus's decision to put Anthropic's anchor tenant on the cap table stacks two claims on one demand forecast; Applied spreads the blank instead, with four leases written in near-identical language and no way from the outside to check how much of one counterparty's demand sits behind them.

The wider pipeline is being priced on the same question: Nscale's US listing attempt, reported in August, asks public investors to pay infrastructure prices for a $51bn contracted backlog while it funds a 10GW buildout. Names, in that trade, are the whole underwriting, and Applied has 1.4GW of contracted load but only one counterparty the market can look up, a thinner foundation than the portfolio language suggests.

Polaris Forge 3 is slated to begin operations in August 2027 and Brookwood in 2028, by which point the placeholder tenant descriptions will need to have become credits. The 750MW of grid-connected power running ahead of the lease book is the number to watch, and the identity of the tenant behind Brookwood remains the detail the disclosure has not supplied.