Applied Digital - Q4 2024
August 28, 2024
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good afternoon, and welcome to Applied Digital's fiscal fourth quarter 2024 conference call. My name is Shamali, and I will be your operator today. Before this call, Applied Digital issued its financial results for the fiscal fourth quarter, ending May 31st, 2024, in a press release, a copy of which will be furnished in a report on a Form 8-K filed with the SEC and will be available in the investor relations section of the company's website. Joining us on today's call are Applied Digital's Chairman and CEO, Wes Cummins, and CFO, David Rench. Following the remarks, we will open the call for questions. Before we begin, Matt Glover from Gateway Group will make a brief introductory statement. Mr. Glover, please proceed.
Matt Glover (Head of Investor Relations)
Great. Thank you, Shamali. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Applied Digital's fourth quarter 2024 conference call. Before management begins their formal remarks, we'd like to remind everyone that some statements we're making today may be considered forward-looking under securities laws and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. As a result, we caution you that there are a number of factors, many of which are beyond our control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For more detailed risks, uncertainties, assumptions relating to our forward-looking filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, we disclaim any obligation or any undertaking to update forward-looking statements to reflect circumstances or events that occur after the date, except as required by law.
We will also discuss non-GAAP financial metrics and encourage you to read our disclosures in the reconciliation tables, the applicable GAAP measures in our earnings release, which can be found on the investor relations section of our website, carefully as you consider these metrics. We refer you to our filings with the SEC for detailed disclosures and descriptions for our business, as well as uncertainties and other variable circumstances, including but not limited to, risks and uncertainties identified under the captioned risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K, our quarterly report on Form 10-Q. You may get Applied Digital's Securities and Exchange Commission filings for free by visiting the SEC website at www.sec.gov. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and will be made available for replay via a link available in the investor relations section of Applied Digital's website.
Now I'd like to turn the call over to Applied Digital's Chairman and CEO, Wes Cummins. Wes?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Thanks, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our fiscal fourth quarter 2024 conference call. I want to start by expressing gratitude to our employees for their ongoing hard work and service in supporting our mission of providing purpose-built infrastructure to the rapidly growing high-performance computing industry. Before turning the call over to our CFO, David Rench, for a detailed review of our financial results, I'd like to share some recent developments across our business. During the quarter, we faced several challenges that impacted our financial performance due to the facility power outages in our data center hosting business. Despite these short-term setbacks, the company has made significant progress with our key growth initiatives, including the development of our cloud services business and the construction of our purpose-built 100 MW HPC data center in Ellendale.
As previously announced, we executed an LOI with a U.S.-based hyperscaler for 400 MW at our Ellendale campus, inclusive of our current 100 MW facility and two forthcoming buildings. Now I will provide an update on each of our business units. Let's begin by discussing our data center hosting business. Our 106 MW Jamestown facility has consistently met expectations, operating at full capacity with uninterrupted uptime throughout the quarter. This achievement marks the seventh consecutive quarter of full capacity operation for this facility. While we are pleased with Jamestown's performance, we encounter challenges at other facilities. As previously disclosed, our 180 MW Ellendale facility in North Dakota experienced a power outage starting in January, which we determined was caused by transformer failures. By the end of the fourth quarter, we had successfully replaced the transformers and related components with equipment from industry-leading North American manufacturers.
As a result of the transformers being replaced, we now have 286 MW of data center hosting capacity for our blockchain clients across our two fully contracted locations in North Dakota. Let's move on to our cloud services business, which provides high-performance computing power for AI applications. This segment continues to experience growth as we advance in fulfilling our existing contracts and exploring new opportunities in our pipeline. As of the end of the fourth quarter, we had four clusters online, and we brought two, another two clusters online in the first quarter of 2025. Lastly, let me provide an update on our HPC data centers. We currently have 400 MW of capacity under development across North Dakota.
This is in addition to the 7.5 MW of IT capacity at our HPC facility in Jamestown, which, due to its proximity to Ellendale, should allow for a low latency, interconnected, extended campus in North Dakota. During the quarter, we continued to make significant strides in the construction of our first proprietary 100 MW high-performance computing facility in Ellendale, North Dakota. This state-of-the-art facility will feature cost-effective, highly efficient, liquid-cooled infrastructure, specifically designed for the most demanding HPC applications. We have made substantial progress in the construction of the 369,000 sq ft facility. I encourage you to visit our new website for some recent images of the facility. As previously mentioned, we have entered into exclusivity and executed a letter of intent with a U.S.-based hyperscaler for a 400 MW capacity lease.
We believe the hyperscaler has completed their technical and site due diligence on the location and are now working to finalize the details of the lease. This will be followed by finalizing the project-level financing for this investment-grade tenant. We are focused on finalizing the lease and project financing for our Ellendale campus, and we have started marketing three additional campuses totaling 1.4 GW. All of these campuses have power available in 2026. In summary, we are encouraged by the positive trends we are witnessing across our business and remain confident in our growth trajectory. We're excited about the numerous potential catalysts on the horizon, and are committed to strategically allocating our capital to achieve the highest risk-adjusted returns and maximize shareholder value.
With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO, David Rench, to walk you through our financials and provide an update on guidance. David?
David Rench (CFO)
Thanks, Wes, and good afternoon, everyone. Let me begin by addressing the complexity of this quarter's financial reporting. We reported an adjusted EBITDA of approximately $4.8 million. However, several one-time items significantly impacted our financial performance and comparability to prior quarters. Notably, a large portion of the power was out in our data center hosting facility in Ellendale, North Dakota, which then largely came online right at the end of the quarter. Additionally, we incurred many one-time professional service expenses, primarily related to our capital raising initiatives, financial analysis for data center financing, and strategic transactions. We continue to pursue all available remedies to recoup lost revenues and additional costs incurred from the transformer outages. Let's delve into the results of the quarter. Revenues for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2024 were $43.7 million, compared to $22 million for the same period in 2023.
The increase was primarily driven by expanded capacity across our data center hosting facilities and revenue contributions from the cloud service contracts. Specifically, our data center hosting segment generated $26.9 million in revenue, while our cloud services segment contributed $16.8 million. Turning to cost of revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2024, it amounted to $46.3 million, up from $15.9 million in the same quarter of 2023. This increase can be attributed to higher energy costs resulting from the increased number of megawatts used to generate hosting revenues. Additionally, depreciation and amortization expenses, along with personnel costs, rose due to the growth of the business as more facilities came online.
Selling and general administrative expenses for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2024 were $31.3 million, compared to $12.3 million in the prior year's comparable period. The increase was primarily due to startup costs as we ramped up the cloud service business. This included higher depreciation, amortization, and lease costs on assets not yet supporting revenue, as well as personnel costs to support the overall growth of the business. The net loss for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2024 was $64.8 million, or $0.52 per basic and diluted share. This calculation is based on a weighted average share count during the quarter of approximately 124.7 million.
In comparison, the net loss for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2023 was $6.5 million, or $0.07 per basic and diluted share, based on a weighted average share count during the quarter of approximately 94.1 million. Adjusted net loss, a non-GAAP measure for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2024, was $45.3 million, or adjusted net loss per basic and diluted share of $0.36, based on a weighted average share count during the quarter of approximately 124.7 million. This compares to an adjusted net loss of $0.01 per million or I'm sorry, adjusted net loss of $100,000, or less than $0.01 per basic and diluted share for the fourth quarter of 2023, based on a weighted average share count of approximately 94.1 million during the quarter.
Adjusted EBITDA, another non-GAAP measure for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2024, was $4.8 million, compared to adjusted EBITDA for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2023, which stood at $3.4 million. The significant difference between our adjusted earnings and our adjusted EBITDA is largely driven by our accelerated depreciation schedule of our GPU hardware. Moving to our balance sheet, we ended the fiscal fourth quarter with $31.7 million in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash, along with $125.4 million in debt. Subsequent to the fiscal year end, we secured over $150 million in funding from various financings in the settlement of the Garden City contingency.
We continue to explore additional financing for the cloud service business, which will better align the economics of that business with the life of the assets by extending the depreciation from two to six years, the industry norm. I would like to reiterate that we are focused on project-level financing for the Ellendale HPC campus, which we expect to fund shortly after the finalization of a lease agreement with the U.S.-based hyperscaler. Now I'll turn the call over to Wes for closing remarks.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Thank you, David. We understand the past year has seen challenges as the company has faced a multi-month outage at our Ellendale hosting facility and the financial burden of funding a billion-dollar data center while funding our cloud business. Nevertheless, we've made substantial progress towards securing greater than a decade-long lease agreement with a Fortune 50 company for our Ellendale campus. Finalizing this lease will solidify our position as a leader in the HPC data center market and have a cascading effect on our ability to secure asset-level financing and develop additional sites. Throughout this process, we've diligently worked to secure project-level debt for our facility with multiple interested parties. Upon execution of the lease with the hyperscaler, we anticipate our financing partner, CIM Group, will release additional capital to support ongoing construction while we continue to work toward project-level finance.
In summary, despite significant challenges this quarter, largely due to external factors, we remain fully committed to delivering strong long-term shareholder value. Our vision is to become a development platform capable of building and operating multiple HPC data centers. This starts with our Ellendale campus and continues with three additional campuses we are actively marketing today, totaling 1.4 GW. To support this vision, we have added several industry veterans to our team, and we're already working on the design of our next two buildings, which will provide 300 MW of capacity. We're incredibly proud of the progress made this quarter and look forward to providing further updates as we move into fiscal 2025. Looking ahead, we believe Q4 marked bottom for our revenues and anticipate sequential improvements in the top line as we enter the first quarter. We now welcome your questions. Operator?
Operator (participant)
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please, while we pull for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Lucas Pipes with B. Riley Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Lucas Pipes (Managing Director)
Thank you very much, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. Wes and team, my first question is on the Ellendale HPC campus, and I wondered if you could speak to the percentage completion on the first 100 MW and the remaining capital requirements from here. Thank you very much.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Sure, Lucas. So the—we have a little over $200 million into the facility as it stands today. The building, I'm sure you've seen some of the video footage, is fully enclosed. We're progressing with MEP at this point, and then we'll do the final fit out in later this year, early next year. And so the, you know, this facility will be, you know, roughly $1 billion, a little over $1 billion for the first 100 MW, which is on par with standard Tier III data center capacity. And so with the $200 million in, you know, I think I've talked about this in the past. We're working with banks that typically provide project-level finance in this space.
We have term sheets, and we've actually selected a bank that we're moving forward with, and the expectation is that they'll fund the remainder in the... You know, we've seen 80%-90% loan-to-cost quotations from this. We just need to get past the lease finalization, and the project-level finance process is already running at this point, so we'd hope to close that shortly, you know, thereafter.
Lucas Pipes (Managing Director)
Thank you very much for the detail. And Wes, did I hear it right, that you said kind of fit out early next year? And, would that include completion, or how would you frame that up in terms of that timeline?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah.
Lucas Pipes (Managing Director)
Thank you.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Lucas, there's a couple of different timelines that we worked through here as we've gone through the process. There's our build timeline, and then there's, you know, when our customer wants the facility ready for service. That's not completely locked in at this point. But our schedule from the build perspective is what we've talked about in the past, you know, being ready late this year or early next year.
Lucas Pipes (Managing Director)
Thank you. Thank you very much for this. And changing topics really quickly on the cloud services business, can you speak to the ramp in your fiscal first quarter? How many clusters did you have online, and how would you kind of frame up the revenue opportunity Q1 fiscal Q1 here versus just fiscal Q4 period that you just reported? Thank you.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Sure, Lucas. So where we are there is, as we said on in the prepared remarks, we're six clusters online in Q1, and it won't be for the full Q1, but those came online, I believe, in June, so it'll be for the majority of it. So with the six clusters up, that business is of roughly $100 million, you know, revenue run rate on an annual basis. And right now, you know, I've talked about on previous calls that our team is very focused on the enterprise market. We started with the, you know, the AI labs and the AI startups, but we're very focused on the enterprise market at this point.
We have been working on it for, you know, seven or eight months, now, and we've probably seen recently, we've hired a new CRO that came from IBM, that's very focused on that market. And so we see the demand there, and we'll continue to ramp that. The other piece of the puzzle here is we have been working on financing that we're putting in place that, you know, it finances this deployment, this equipment in a way that makes it run through our income statement more fairly versus what it does today. So we don't want to keep adding a lot with the capital lease structure that we currently have, just because of...
You see what it does to the financials, because we're forced to do the depreciation over two years versus, you know, the industry standard of five or six. So those two pieces are coming together, and then, but we do still see a significant amount of demand, but really growing demand from the enterprise side of the market.
Lucas Pipes (Managing Director)
Wes, I appreciate your details to you and the team. Best of luck.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Thanks, Lucas.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rob Brown with Lake Street Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Rob Brown (Founding Partner and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Good afternoon. Just following up the AI cloud, on the AI cloud business, I think the six clusters, what's sort of the range of clusters you think you can grow that business into, and how do you think about that versus the data center business?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
... Yeah, so the on both of these businesses, Rob, we think about these businesses in the same way. These are asset-heavy businesses, capital-intensive businesses. We need to have the right mechanisms in place to do asset-level financing for both of them. And so we've talked about that on the data center side. We're almost there. We've talked about it, you know, pretty extensively on the GPU side. I think we're almost there as well. And so when we have the correct asset-level financing mechanisms in place, I think we'll be able to grow significantly on both sides of that business.
On the AI cloud portion of the business, with the data center capacity that we have in place today and what's available to us as we go through 2025, we can generate significant growth in that business, and we see the demand for it, but we need to get the right capital base in that business to grow it aggressively. Right now, we're kind of feeding both of them, and we need to move that financing down to an asset level from a company level.
Rob Brown (Founding Partner and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay, great. Thank you. And then on your hyperscaler contract, I assume the... Just in terms of the timeline, the long lead items there are the due diligence, I assume, in the site and the technical due diligence. But sort of what percentage of completion are you at in terms of getting the contract through its process?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
It's hard to handicap that, but I would, I would say we're, you know, north of 90% of the way there.
Rob Brown (Founding Partner and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay. Okay, great. Thank you. I'll turn it over.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Darren Aftahi with Roth Capital Partners. Please proceed with your question.
Darren Aftahi (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Thanks. Just following up on the, on the lease. I guess from a big picture perspective, like, how much of this is small details being ironed out versus a larger framework? And then I guess my other question in regards to the lease is just how much is a backlog in the law firm that's actually doing this holding up this process? Thanks.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
That's a good, that's a good question, Darren. So as far as the details, there's large items, and then there's very small items, and sometimes the small items can take as long as the large items there. But you know, there's an extensive process around you know, fiber connectivity, you know, power, firm power, redundancy on power, that you know, took a significant amount of time to complete. But there's a lot of small details. So I would say it's you know, it's a split between those, and you and it's you know, funny, sometimes some of the smaller details take longer. But the question on the...
You know, it's hard to get a view on the law firm, but there's only a few that deal with most of these contracts, and so there definitely is a backlog out there, but I can't handicap or just talk about how much, you know, slowdown is due to that. This is our first time through, so this is the only environment we've experienced.
Darren Aftahi (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Got it. And just one more on your pipeline of other campuses. I guess, one, where are you in the marketing process? And then, two, what's your propensity to diversify your customer base with those other campuses versus, say, if the existing U.S. hyperscaler, you know, the LOI with, had more interest in capacity, if they wanted to take that down, just to be kinda compare and contrast those thoughts? Thanks.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Sure. So we've just recently kicked that process off. You know, there's people. We send out tear sheets and binders for these sites. And we have, you know, a more refined process, I would say, at this point than we did for the Ellendale campus. But we're still there. We're still pretty focused on hyperscalers for these sites. You know, we're focusing on sites that are at least 200+ MW of critical IT capacity, so that, you know, is gonna equate to, depending on what part of the country you're in, somewhere between, you know, 250 MW-300 MW of utility power. So those are the types of sites and customers that we're focused on.
There's other customers in the market, but we have a pretty narrow focus of how we go to market with these new sites.
Darren Aftahi (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Great. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Grondahl with Northland Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Mike Grondahl (Head of Equity Research and Senior Research Analyst)
Hey, thanks, guys. Wes, could you repeat what you said? The six clusters are driving an annualized run rate of how much revenue? I heard $100 million, but it kinda came through a little garbled.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah, it's about $100 million-$110 million, Mike.
Mike Grondahl (Head of Equity Research and Senior Research Analyst)
Okay, $100 million to $110 million. And I think what you were saying is, hey, there's a lot of demand for that business, but you're kinda gonna stay at about six clusters until you get a better financing structure in place, and then you would expect to see more growth. Is that a fair summary?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah, that's a good summary. We're working on a better, you know, financing structure because you see... I mean, you can look at kind of where our adjusted EBITDA is versus where our earnings are, and that's driven largely by the accelerated depreciation schedule on those GPUs. And so we need to have the type of financing, one, that is at the right cost for us, and then, two, allows us to depreciate these over the useful life rather than during the financing period, if that makes sense.
Mike Grondahl (Head of Equity Research and Senior Research Analyst)
... Sure, sure. And hey, in the press release, you, you kind of referred to this development platform on the HPC side, you know, with the potential to go from 400 MW to 1.4 GW. Do you think that first hyperscaler customer is interested in more than the existing 400 MW you're talking to them about? You know, could you end up being a one-stop shop for them for, you know, another big project or two?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
No, I definitely think we could, but there's other demand in the market as well from similar type customers. There's a significant amount of demand for this capacity, especially, you know, near-term power. So 2025 power, you know, 2025 power is done, unless, you know, we have that for Ellendale. Now we're focused on, you know, 2026 power and then 2027 power, but I think near-term power is key, and you need to have the right type of power. Again, you know, one of the reasons when we talked about selling our Texas facility, we don't believe that facility works for HPC, at least not the way we want to develop it. So you need the right type of power, so we're really focused on near-term power.
Mike, just to clarify, that the 1.4 GW is just the additional three sites. It doesn't include Ellendale. So, you know, that's what we're focused on the market there. But I think the potential current customer, as well as others like them, you know, there's a significant amount of demand for near-term power in the market.
John Todaro (Managing Director)
Got it. Great. Hey, thanks a lot.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of George Sutton with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.
George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)
Thank you. Wes, nothing on the call has surprised me except for one statement. You mentioned it's not clear when the customer might want to go live with the lease. Can you just clarify that statement?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah, uh-
George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)
My assumption had been, we want to get this up and running as fast as humanly possible, and that's why you're building out as rapidly as you are.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So that's correct, George, a correct way to look at it. But there's, you know, different stages for this as far as when you're doing fit-out, what we're adding in for the fit-out, so there's a lot of moving parts there. I mean, it's fairly buttoned down, but we'll save the details of that for when, you know, this is finished, and we can share that, you know, publicly.
George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)
Okay. And relative to the GPU financing structure, our understanding, knowing that market pretty well, is it's gotten a lot better. It's gotten a lot more financiable. Can you just talk about the level of interest you've had from folks in putting a structure together there? Kinda where does that stand?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So, you know, we started this process a while ago, and you are correct in that just the interest level has grown and the cost of capital has come down. It really, George, depends on the kind of the offtaker here, just like on the data center side. So the financing pricing depends a lot on the offtaker, and so, you know, your highest costs are gonna be AI labs and startups, and then enterprise is gonna be significantly lower. And then if you were doing, you know, the deployment with a hyperscaler, it's gonna go, you know, even lower from there. But we're seeing a significant amount of new entrants into that market, and we've seen a lot of interest, and I think we'll, you know, have be successful in putting that structure in place for ourselves.
George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)
So just to clarify on that, the financiers are saying, "We're happy to put something together. We wanna see the customer names, and once you provide a high quality enough name, we would want to fund this." Is that-
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah.
George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)
Chicken and egg to some extent?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
It kind of is, George. What you should think of is a facility that gets put in place, and it's a drawdown facility as you buy equipment, and you know, you do show customer contracts, and typically, the kind of structures that we see in this is you'll, you know, form like a bankruptcy remote SPV, and then the loans go into that, the GPUs go into that, and the customer contracts go into that, and in some cases, you know, the colocation contracts go into that as well. And so it's kind of a self-contained financing solution.
George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)
Gotcha. Okay, thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Todaro with Needham & Company. Please proceed with your question.
John Todaro (Managing Director)
Hey, Wes. Thanks for taking my question. Two for you. First, just trying to do due diligence as much as possible, kind of the timeline for that lease agreement. So you had mentioned they finalized their technical requirements. You know, is that kind of you think about it, the first stage? And how many stages would you say there are, or is it really now just kind of done down to some final details? And then, second question, you had mentioned that the Garden City site, that you didn't think it was suitable for HPC. Obviously, a lot of the Bitcoin miners out there are kind of trying to go down that West Texas route. It hasn't been done yet.
Just curious, why did you think that that site and maybe that region wouldn't really be possible for HPC?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
So hey, John. On the. I would not say. I mean, it's all kind of when you say is that the first step of the process on the lease side, you know, it all kind of goes together. But I would say we're finalizing the last details of that, is the way I would characterize it. And then on what we've learned, you know, through this process and what we had seen previously, but especially through this process, is I don't think for us, for our company, you know, everyone else has their own strategy. But I don't think for us having a large flexible load in the ERCOT market is going to be suitable for the kind of customers that we are pursuing in that business.
You know, I don't know what changes will happen, but I know there are changes in the legislature that have been proposed in the legislature, in the state of Texas, that will make, you know, it even harder with the large flexible load structure to serve, again, the type of customers we're looking at serving. So right now, we're not pursuing anything in the state of Texas at the moment. That could change in the future, but there's, you know, firm power redundancy, and not just redundancy of what you build on the site, like, you know, like UPS or backup gen. Redundancy in having, you know, multiple power lines or feeds in from different directions into the substation or switching station that you're drawing power from.
There's a lot of pieces that we've learned going through this process, and that's the type of sites that we, you know, have locked up and are locking up in marketing. But you know, I'm not that bullish on just specifically the large flexible load in the state of Texas.
John Todaro (Managing Director)
That's helpful, Wes. Appreciate that. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Kevin Dede with H.C. Wainwright & Co. Please proceed with your question.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Thanks. Hi, Wes. I was wondering if you could take a little time just to characterize the overall environment. I understand you're targeting 1.4 GW. What's the competitive environment like, and how are you confident that Applied wins versus, you know, your competitors?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Sure. So there's two parts to that. So from the environment, as I mentioned earlier, we see a very strong demand for near-term power, so we're very focused on power that can come online through the end of 2027. So power is the number one bottleneck at the moment. And then when you step back to what I believe is the number two bottleneck, it's supply chain. And there are a lot of stretched components in the supply chain. I'm happy to walk through those, but that's the second part. So we have a significant amount of experience in the supply chain. A lot of the things, you know, we for the first data center build we had ordered last year.
We bought our places in line for you know, switchgear, transformers, a lot of the key components that are needed to build these. So those are the two pieces, and I think we're in a great position from both of those kind of competitive dynamics. You know, I think the biggest thing for us is getting through this first lease. That'll be you know, something that validates what we're doing as a company in North Dakota, and our ability to go and find these sites, develop them, and bring them online for very large companies and demanding companies. And so, there's a lot of competition in the market.
We see the majority of our competition being, you know, private data center companies that have been building for hyperscalers for years already, you know, decade even. So those are the ones that we see as the majority of the competition in the market. And there's, you know, a handful of those platforms out there that are building hundreds of megawatts or, in some cases, over a gigawatt of power for hyperscalers. So this is not necessarily a new market, it's just a new style of data center.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
As you go up to bid for a site and you see these other private companies that have been doing this a little bit longer than Applied has, why would you win that contract? Why should we believe that you're going to have a foot up in that competition?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
So I think it's important to understand the companies that we have historically or that have historically been in this market, and the way kind of data center the industry has been historically, is when a company wants to build new capacity, they typically look for the region they want to be in. So let's just. I'm sitting in Dallas. Let's say they want to be in Dallas. And so there's a couple of different tools that you can license for locating, you know, data center space in the DFW area. And those tools really focus on the fiber maps. And so what it what it'll do is basically match the type of fiber connectivity you need and then available real estate on the map.
And then you'll find a location, purchase that location, and then you'll make a request to the utility for power. And so what's happened in the market now is, you know, companies are still doing that, but those power requests, you know, goes in a queue, and in a lot of the most popular markets, that is stretching out, you know, five-plus, and in some cases, over ten years before you're going to get that power, especially at the amounts of power that are needed for these new style facilities. And so that's the big, you know, gating item. Now, us on the other hand, we go about it kind of the inverse way. We find power availability, and then we make sure that that power is the type of power that can be used for our type of development.
You know what I've mentioned before on redundancy. And then we make sure that the fiber connectivity is there, and now we've refined that even further, to include kind of latencies to different locations. And then we can go and then either, you know, start developing that site, like we did in Ellendale, or marketing some of our other locations. I think we're unique and one of the few companies that goes about it that way and is this far along. You know, if you look back at our history, we started down this path in 2022, and so we have, you know, a few years of experience doing this, and now, you know, our knowledge level has went up dramatically in the last six months, you know, inside the company about how to go about this.
I think just the availability of power and the right kind of power at the right type of sites with the right type of fiber connectivity are what really give us an advantage.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Would you think it's also fair to say that you're looking under rocks and perhaps more rural locations with less concern of latency on latency?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
So we are, for sure. That's what I was mentioning earlier about how traditional data center companies go about it, and we go about it in a very different way. We've definitely tightened the, you know, the bands on what we know about kind of the latency requirements. So, you know, we're not necessarily gonna be looking at really far-flung locations, but we have a lot more knowledge base around, you know, the, the type of latency requirements, you know, in North America that we will need to meet for the site, so it's helped us with our site selection even more.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Can you talk a little bit about where Applied stands now on the cloud AI biz? How many sites do you have, and you know, what's active, and what do you think once your financing, you know, your structured financing in place, how you'll be able to access those this fiscal year?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So, you know, we have a lot of the same locations, right? We have Minnesota, we have our site in Jamestown. We have co-lo capacity in Denver and Salt Lake City. Those are the primary large ones. We have a smaller one in Las Vegas. So we have that capacity. There's open capacity, which is, I think, a very big asset in the market. It's extremely difficult to find and ready for deployment. We have demand that's coming through on the enterprise side, and there still is strong demand in that market. So when we get the right type of financing in place, we'll be able to reaccelerate the growth of that business.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
So all told, can you give us a rough ballpark on the megawatts that you have access to?
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
We have.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
For that aspect of the business.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
... megawatt capacity secured of just over 40 MW for deployment, just over 30 MW.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Perfect.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
That's-
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Thanks very much, Wes.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah, and Kevin, that's ready now. That's not for in the future.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Yeah. No, that's... Yeah, that was the nature of my question.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Yep.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
I appreciate the color, Wes. Appreciate the color.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Absolutely.
Kevin Dede (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Thank you very much.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question and answer session. Therefore, I'll turn the call back over to Wes Cummins for closing remarks.
Wes Cummins (Chairman and CEO)
Thanks, operator. Thanks everyone for joining the call, and look forward to speaking to you next quarter.
Operator (participant)
This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your cooperation.