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.

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.