TL;DR · 30-second read
The Short Version
Applied Digital, a company that builds giant computer warehouses for artificial intelligence, says customers have signed leases worth about $36 billion. Before five new deals this past year, that figure was $7 billion.
The buildings covered by those leases are designed to draw about as much electricity as roughly a million American homes.
The catch: in this business, rent generally starts only once a building is finished, powered and handed over. The company now pays its president partly on how much capacity actually gets delivered, not just how much gets signed.
Applied Digital (Nasdaq: APLD) reported in its definitive proxy statement, filed with the SEC on September 25, 2026, that five leases signed during fiscal 2026 (the year ended May 31, 2026) raised its initial-term contracted revenue from $7 billion to approximately $36 billion, before any customer renewal or expansion options. Stock Titan, summarizing the filing, reported that total contracted critical IT load stands at 1.41 gigawatts (GW).
The same proxy sets out five-year equity awards for CEO Wes Cummins, President Jason Zhang and CFO Saidal Mohmand, and calls stockholders to a virtual annual meeting on November 4, 2026, to elect six directors, ratify CBIZ CPAs P.C. as auditor, and cast an advisory vote on executive pay.
Executive Summary
The headline number is a roughly fivefold jump in contracted revenue in a single fiscal year: from $7 billion to about $36 billion, driven by five leases. That places Applied Digital among the AI data center developers with the largest disclosed lease backlogs, and it is tied to 1.41 GW of critical IT load, meaning the electricity available to the servers themselves, before cooling and building overhead.
What makes the filing more than a backlog update is how the company has chosen to pay its leadership against it. President Jason Zhang’s performance shares are measured half on contracted revenue and half on ready-for-service delivery, CFO Saidal Mohmand’s on net operating income, and CEO Wes Cummins’s on share-price hurdles the proxy describes as interdependent with the other two. In effect, the board has written into its pay plan that signing leases is only half the job; turning them into energized, revenue-producing capacity is the other half.
That framing matters because it arrives after only 52.6% of votes supported the company’s 2025 say-on-pay proposal, and because the conversion from contract to delivered megawatt is where AI infrastructure schedules most often slip.
From $7 Billion to $36 Billion in One Fiscal Year
The proxy’s figure is initial-term contracted revenue: the total rent customers have committed to pay over the base length of their leases, excluding renewal and expansion options. On that measure, five leases signed between June 2025 and May 2026 added roughly $29 billion. Dividing $36 billion by 1.41 GW gives a blended figure of about $25.5 million of initial-term revenue per contracted megawatt. That is simple arithmetic on two disclosed totals, not an annual rate, because the lease terms are not broken out; a 15-year lease and a 10-year lease at the same headline value imply very different yearly income.
The excluded options cut both ways. They represent potential upside if tenants renew or expand, but they are not commitments, and the $36 billion should be read as the contracted floor rather than a projection of lifetime value. For industry readers, the useful comparison is not against other developers’ press-release totals but against Applied Digital’s own delivery rate: how quickly 1.41 GW of contracted load becomes billing capacity.
Contracted Is Not Delivered: Why 1.41 GW Is the Real Test
In wholesale data center leasing, rent typically begins when a hall or building is declared ready for service (RFS): powered, cooled, commissioned and handed to the tenant. Until then, a signed lease is a promise on both sides, and the developer carries the construction cost, the equipment procurement and the utility interconnection work. A 1.41 GW critical IT load also understates the site-level power requirement, since total facility draw is higher once cooling and electrical losses are added; the proxy lists power usage effectiveness (PUE), the ratio of total facility power to IT power, among its key terms for exactly this reason.
Applied Digital’s compensation design makes this conversion explicit. Jason Zhang’s performance stock units (PSUs, shares that vest only if targets are hit) are split evenly between contracted revenue and ready-for-service delivery. Saidal Mohmand’s rest on two net operating income hurdles, which can only be cleared once leased capacity is operating and paying. Wes Cummins’s three share-price hurdles are described as interdependent with the success of the other two awards. The board has, in other words, tied the top three executives’ largest equity grants to the same chain: sign, deliver, earn.
The people most exposed to that chain sit outside the company as well. Tenants are planning AI deployments around RFS dates. Lenders and equity holders are underwriting construction against rent that has not yet started. Utilities, transformer makers and cooling suppliers are the ones who have to deliver the physical inputs on schedule. A backlog this large is a strong demand signal; whether it is a strong earnings signal depends on those delivery dates, which is the measure the company itself has chosen to be judged on.
A Five-Year Pay Plan After a 52.6% Vote
The awards to Cummins, Zhang and Mohmand use a five-year performance and vesting horizon, a 25/75 split between time-based restricted stock units (RSUs) and performance-based PSUs, and a two-year holding requirement after PSUs vest. They are intended to be the three executives’ only company equity awards for five years from grant. The Compensation Committee says the structure reflects longer project cycles and that stockholder feedback, following 52.6% support for say-on-pay in 2025, informed its fiscal 2026 decisions. Support at that level is well below the threshold at which proxy advisers commonly expect a board to show it has responded.
Both sides of the debate have a fair point to test. Supporters of front-loaded, multi-year grants argue they match compensation to multi-year construction timelines and reduce annual grant churn. Skeptics of the design generally ask how demanding the hurdles are, how share-price targets interact with dilution from future capital raises, and whether a single large grant concentrates risk. The November 4 advisory vote will indicate which reading stockholders favor.
The proxy also notes that on April 29, 2026, the board formed separate committees of directors it identifies as independent to review and approve or ratify related-party transactions with ChronoScale and Base Electron expected to exceed, or potentially exceed, $120,000 in a fiscal year. Establishing dedicated committees is a governance safeguard; the scale and nature of those relationships are what stockholders will want to follow.
Background
Applied Digital is a Dallas-based developer and operator of data centers that began by hosting high-power computing for cryptocurrency mining and has since repositioned toward purpose-built campuses for AI and high-performance computing, leased to large compute customers on long-term contracts. Its fiscal year ends May 31.
The wider AI infrastructure market has shifted toward multi-year, gigawatt-scale leases in which developers secure land and power, build to a tenant’s specification and begin collecting rent once capacity is ready for service. Backlogs have grown quickly across the sector; the pace at which utilities, equipment suppliers and construction crews can turn those contracts into energized capacity has become the practical constraint on how fast they convert into revenue. Source: Five leases lifted Applied Digital (APLD)’s initial-term contracted revenue beyond $7 billion. – Stock Titan, a summary of Applied Digital’s definitive proxy statement reporting initial-term contracted revenue rising from $7 billion to about $36 billion across 1.41 GW of contracted critical IT load. Primary sources: Applied Digital Corp. Definitive Proxy Statement (Form DEF 14A), filed September 25, 2026 — SEC EDGAR.Sources