Applied Digital announced on October 2 that it has achieved Ready for Service for the second phase of Building 2 at its Polaris Forge 1 campus in Ellendale, North Dakota, delivering an additional 75 megawatts of critical IT load across three 25 MW data halls. The milestone completes Building 2's full 150 MW and brings the campus's fully operational critical IT load to 250 MW, according to the company's press release distributed via GlobeNewswire.
The campus is contracted to deliver 400 MW of critical IT load at full buildout — and every megawatt of it is already leased. For continuous coverage of the AI infrastructure buildout, from gigawatt campuses to chip supply chains, AI Buzz Wire tracks the developments that matter as they happen.
Building 2 is now complete
The latest delivery follows two earlier phases at Polaris Forge 1: the first 100 MW building, and the initial 75 MW phase of Building 2 that came online in July. With the second phase of Building 2 now ready for service, all 150 MW of the structure's planned capacity is operational. In total, 250 MW across the campus is energized and serving customers — roughly 62 percent of the 400 MW the site is contracted to deliver at full buildout.
The company describes the milestone in deliberately operational terms. Ready for Service means the halls have moved past construction into commissioned, customer-serving status — the stage where design, build, and commissioning work gives way to running infrastructure at load. Per the announcement, the three new halls each carry 25 MW of critical IT load, the industry's standard yardstick for the usable capacity that actually reaches customer equipment.
Applied Digital, which has operated in Ellendale since 2021 and is headquartered in Dallas, positions Polaris Forge 1 as an AI factory campus: large-scale, purpose-built data center capacity engineered for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads rather than general cloud services. The company says it has built long-standing relationships with local leaders and partners in Ellendale, and frames the campus's continued expansion around responsible development and long-term value for the communities where it builds.
Cummins: turning megawatts into usable capacity
"Bringing another 75 MW of AI infrastructure online at Polaris Forge 1 further demonstrates our ability to turn large-scale power into operational AI infrastructure," said Wes Cummins, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Applied Digital, in the announcement. "Securing power is only the starting point. The real work is designing, building, commissioning, and operating the infrastructure that transforms those megawatts into usable capacity for customers. That is the capability we continue to scale across our platform."
The quote is a concise statement of the thesis behind the entire AI data center sector: power interconnection agreements have become the headline milestones, but the scarce skill is converting signed megawatts into commissioned, cooled, networked capacity on schedule. Applied Digital's stock, which trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker APLD, has been one of the market's barometers for that execution risk.
The financing behind the buildout
Delivering campuses at this scale requires heavy upfront capital, and Applied Digital has been assembling it throughout 2026. In June, the company priced $1.59 billion of senior secured notes to fund its buildout, according to its investor relations disclosures, and it delivered the second building at Polaris Forge 1 the following month. The company reported its fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 results in late July and has scheduled its fiscal first quarter 2027 earnings call for October 7 — an update investors will scrutinize for leasing momentum beyond the 400 MW already contracted.
Why 250 MW matters in the AI power race
The AI industry's compute hunger has turned data center power capacity into a competitive currency. Frontier model training runs and always-on inference fleets both demand sustained, high-density power, and campuses like Polaris Forge 1 exist because it can take years to assemble land, grid interconnection, substations, and cooling at the scale AI workloads require.
Against that backdrop, the steady drumbeat of Ready-for-Service announcements functions as proof of execution: 250 MW online at a single North Dakota campus is a concrete data point in a sector where announced capacity frequently outruns delivered capacity — the difference, as Cummins put it, between securing power and actually operating it. Applied Digital's named Best Data Center in the Americas 2025 award from Datacloud reflects the same positioning. The company describes its portfolio as high-performance, sustainably engineered data centers and colocation services spanning AI, cloud, networking, and blockchain workloads. The remaining 150 MW at Polaris Forge 1 will test whether the company's repeatable construction playbook keeps pace with customer demand that shows no sign of cooling.
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