US data center firm Applied Digital has secured a major customer at its in-development data center campus outside Fargo in North Dakota.

The Nasdaq-listed company announced this week that it has entered into a lease agreement with an unnamed US-based investment-grade hyperscaler at its upcoming Polaris Forge 2 campus.

This lease represents approximately $5 billion in total contracted revenue over an estimated 15-year lease term, and covers 200MW of critical IT load.

The unnamed hyperscaler also holds a first right of refusal for an additional 800MW of critical IT, representing the full expansion potential of the 1GW campus.

First announced in August and currently under construction near Harwood, North Dakota, Polaris Forge 2 is set to offer 1GW across 900 acres. The initial 200MW, phased across two buildings, is expected to start coming online in 2026 and reach a total of 200MW in 2027.

While Applied has previously secured CoreWeave as a customer at its Polaris Forge 1 campus in Ellendale, it seems the AI cloud firm is not the mystery customer. Applied said its total leased capacity across its two campuses in North Dakota has now reached 600MW “with two of the world’s largest hyperscalers.”

“What sets us apart isn’t just the size of our pipeline - it’s how fast we can deliver," said Wes Cummins, chairman and CEO of Applied Digital. “The real constraint in this industry is execution, and our team continues to prove that large-scale, next-generation data centers can be designed, financed, and brought online faster and more efficiently than anyone thought possible. We believe Polaris Forge 2 builds on that momentum, reflecting the strength of our partnerships and the speed at which we’re reshaping the AI infrastructure landscape.”

Construction on Applied’s Polaris Forge 1 campus in Ellendale began in September 2022 as crypto and HPC development. The site was designed to host 400MW of critical IT load, with the company claiming it has more than 1GW of power capacity currently under various stages of load study. Applied already operates a 180MW data center in Ellendale, known as ELN01. The next building, the 369,000 sq ft (34,281 sqm) ELN02 – set to offer 100MW – is for HPC hosting. The site is being fully leased to CoreWeave.

Elsewhere, Applied has a 106MW facility in Jamestown, North Dakota, known as JMS01, and is also planning a 200MW facility in Iowa. In May, it was reported that the company had proposed a "multi-billion-dollar" data center in Toronto, South Dakota, that could offer 430MW of IT capacity.

The company was founded as Applied Blockchain but does not mine its own Bitcoin, traditionally hosting hardware on behalf of other cryptomining firms. It now also hosts HPC and AI hardware amid massive demand for available capacity.

Applied is also offering its own cloud services (at least for now) and has previously said it will host and offer access to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.