Stock Market Today: Applied Digital Soars 31% on CoreWeave Deal and Earnings Surprise

Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) stock skyrocketed 31% on Thursday to close at $13.14, making it one of the day's top-performing small-cap tech stocks. The rally was likely related to the company's stronger-than-expected fiscal Q4 earnings report (released Wednesday after market close) and a major expansion of its long-term lease agreement with AI hyperscaler CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV). The company saw trading volume more than 2.5 times its recent average, indicating heavy institutional interest. While Applied Digital remains about 17% below its 52-week high of $15.42, the stock decisively broke above recent resistance levels and is now up sharply year-to-date.

Broader markets traded softly, the S&P 500 declined 0.4%, while the Nasdaq Composite was effectively flat (down 0.03%) after briefly hitting an all-time intraday high. Still, Applied Digital significantly outperformed key peers. DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN) was little changed at +0.2%, while Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI) slid 2.9%.

In fiscal Q4, Applied reported $38 million in revenue, up 41% year over year, and an adjusted EPS loss of $0.03, easily beating analyst expectations. Most notably, the company announced that CoreWeave exercised a 150-megawatt (MW) lease option, boosting total contracted capacity to 400 MW and unlocking up to $11 billion in potential revenue over the next 15 years.

CEO Wes Cummins emphasized acceleration at the company's Polaris Forge 1 campus and reiterated long-term plans to generate $1 billion in annual NOI within 3–5 years, supported by demand from hyperscale cloud customers.

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Daily Stock News has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. This article was generated with GPT-4o, OpenAI's large-scale language-generation model and has been reviewed by The Motley Fool's AI quality control systems. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends DigitalOcean. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.