Applied Digital secures $550m facility to fund AI data centre pipeline

A Goldman Sachs-arranged revolving credit line gives the AI infrastructure builder firepower to accelerate its high-performance compute campus buildout.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Tue, 9 Jun 2026 - 06:58

A brightly lit server room hallway features rows of empty silver server racks, overhead strip lighting, and large windows providing natural light at the far end.

Applied Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: APLD), the Dallas-based designer and operator of high-performance data centres serving AI, networking, and blockchain workloads, has closed a revolving credit facility of up to $550 million — arranged by Goldman Sachs and backed by a syndicate including Mizuho, Royal Bank of Canada, Banco Santander, Wells Fargo, and First National Bank of Omaha. The facility, which closed on 29 May 2026, carries $350 million of committed capacity with an accordion option of up to a further $200 million, matures in 2029, and is priced at SOFR plus 225 basis points.

The proceeds are earmarked for pre- and post-lease development of Applied Digital's data centre projects alongside general working capital. The company also disclosed a Memorandum of Understanding with GPU cloud provider CoreWeave — struck on 5 June 2026 — to assign the lease for Building 3 at its Polaris Forge 1 campus to a CoreWeave subsidiary, conditional on that subsidiary attaining an investment-grade credit rating.

Banking on AI infrastructure demand

The credit facility is a structural signal as much as a financing event. Applied Digital was founded in 2021 and has grown rapidly on the back of surging enterprise and hyperscaler demand for dedicated AI compute capacity — a market in which lease commitments from large tenants increasingly serve as the collateral underpinning project finance. Saidal Mohmand, the company's CFO, said the syndicate's support "underscores the scale of the opportunity before us and the confidence our banking partners have in our ability to execute," adding that the facility is intended to provide "additional flexibility to advance our development pipeline while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation."

The CoreWeave MOU is a notable subplot. CoreWeave — itself backed by Nvidia and a recent beneficiary of a heavily subscribed IPO — has become one of the most active anchor tenants for independent data centre operators, using long-term leases to lock in capacity ahead of demand from AI model-training and inference workloads. An assignment conditional on an investment-grade rating reflects the growing sophistication of credit structuring in the AI infrastructure space, where tenants' own balance-sheet trajectories are now directly shaping landlords' financing options.

Cross-sector capital flows into compute real estate

The broader context is a convergence of real-estate finance, cloud infrastructure, and AI capital allocation that is reshaping how compute capacity gets built. Traditional data centre development was largely funded by REITs and investment-grade utilities; the new generation of AI-native operators — Applied Digital, CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, and others — is increasingly tapping syndicated revolving credit structures that mirror those used by property developers, reflecting the asset-heavy, lease-backed nature of the business.

For cross-sector investors, this matters beyond the infrastructure niche. As AI model complexity increases, the bottleneck is shifting from model design to raw compute availability — meaning that facilities capable of delivering dense GPU clusters at scale are becoming strategic assets in their own right. Sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors who have been circling the AI supply chain via semiconductor or hyperscaler equity are now finding a new entry point: the physical infrastructure layer, with yield characteristics closer to commercial real estate than to growth tech.

Applied Digital's waterless cooling architecture and its "Polaris Forge AI Factory" model — which the company says is designed to deliver capacity in underserved communities — also position it within the sustainability-conscious infrastructure narrative that is influencing ESG-screened capital allocation. Whether that angle translates into a lower cost of capital over time will depend on how rating agencies and institutional lenders formalise their treatment of AI-infrastructure assets as a distinct category.

The next observable signal will be whether the CoreWeave subsidiary achieves the investment-grade threshold required to trigger the Building 3 lease assignment — a milestone that would both validate CoreWeave's balance-sheet maturation and give Applied Digital's project-finance model a replicable template for future campus developments.