Macquarie and Applied Digital Ink $5B HPC Partnership - InforCapital

Macquarie Asset Management (MAM) has completed its first investment in a strategic partnership with Applied Digital Corporation, providing up to USD 5.0 billion in preferred equity to support the expansion of high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure across the United States.

The initial commitment includes USD 900 million, with USD 112.5 million deployed at close and the remainder to be funded as construction milestones are met at Polaris Forge 1 and leasing expands at additional sites. MAM retains rights to invest up to a total of USD 5.0 billion as Applied Digital scales its platform.

Polaris Forge 1, a 100MW facility and the first building within Applied Digital’s planned 400MW AI Factory campus in Ellendale, North Dakota, is nearing completion and set to begin operations in Q4 2025. The entire site has been leased to CoreWeave, a U.S. cloud computing company serving AI and GPU-intensive workloads. Applied Digital has also started work on Polaris Forge 2, expected to exceed 200MW and launch by the end of 2026.

With this facility-level financing, Applied Digital gains flexibility to complete and scale its HPC developments. As more projects are leased and financing structures secured, MAM may provide additional capital under the agreed preferred equity facility.

Anton Moldan, Senior Managing Director at MAM, emphasized the demand for AI and HPC capacity and praised Applied Digital’s differentiated development pipeline and experienced leadership. He noted that MAM’s global experience managing large-scale data infrastructure makes it an ideal long-term partner in building out Applied’s platform.

Wes Cummins, CEO of Applied Digital, highlighted the value of securing capital at the asset level, which strengthens the balance sheet and allows for accelerated execution. He said that with MAM’s support and strategic guidance, Applied is positioned to become one of the fastest-growing developers in the U.S. AI infrastructure sector.

The partnership comes amid a broader wave of investment in AI infrastructure and data centers. Comparable recent transactions include:

• DigitalBridge and Brookfield’s hyperscale initiatives, which have attracted billions in capital to build out next-generation data center capacity.
• Blackstone’s investment in Vantage Data Centers, fueling U.S. and global expansion of colocation and GPU-ready infrastructure.

The structure of the Applied Digital-MAM deal—pairing preferred equity with performance-based deployment—represents a growing trend in digital infrastructure funding. These models allow for flexibility while tightly linking capital deployment to operational and leasing milestones, an increasingly important structure for scaling capital-intensive assets in the AI era.