Applied Digital has ended months of uncertainty around the location of its fifth AI Factory campus, confirming that Delta Forge 2 will be built near Brookwood in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama.
The newly disclosed location turns a previously anonymous 210 MW lease into a specific $3.2 billion Alabama infrastructure project. Local reporting says the confirmation follows weeks of environmental and transparency questions around the site, while the company had disclosed the underlying hyperscaler lease in June without naming the state.
$3.2 Billion, 210 MW and 1.26 Million Square Feet
Delta Forge 2 is planned around 210 MW of critical IT load. Applied Digital says the campus will span roughly 1.26 million square feet across about 160 acres of a nearly 1,300-acre site. Operations are currently expected to begin in 2028.
The 210 MW is already contracted under a roughly 15-year take-or-pay lease with an unnamed high investment-grade U.S. hyperscaler. The base lease represents approximately $5.2 billion of contracted revenue, with renewal options that could extend the relationship to 30 years.
A Bitcoin-Mining-Era Company Keeps Moving Toward AI
Applied Digital’s evolution is especially notable because the company was previously known as Applied Blockchain. BitcoinVersus.tech covered an earlier stage of that transition when Applied Digital secured $160 million with backing that included NVIDIA.
Delta Forge 2 now sits inside a five-campus contracted portfolio totaling about 1.4 GW of critical IT load. That scale puts the project in the same broader infrastructure cycle as distributed GPU superclusters, large Blackwell GPU deployments and new rack-scale Vera Rubin systems.
The Campus Is More Than a Server Building
AI facilities at this scale are power-and-cooling projects as much as computing projects. Applied Digital says Delta Forge 2 will use closed-loop cooling and high-power-density infrastructure designed for large-scale AI training and inference.
That physical layer is becoming increasingly important as the industry moves toward higher-voltage AI power architectures and denser compute. It also explains why networking manufacturers are adding capacity while data-center developers compete for energized sites.
Brookwood Gets a Long-Term Community Payment Package
Applied Digital says it and its tenant expect to invest more than $3.2 billion in the project. Construction employment is expected to peak above 1,000 workers, with more than 100 full-time positions once the campus is operating.
The company has also committed $270 million in community-benefit payments to the Tuscaloosa County Economic Development Authority over 20 years, alongside an estimated $131.5 million in education taxes over that period. Those figures are company projections rather than money already collected by local governments.
The New Information Is the Location and Local Buildout
Applied Digital announced the 210 MW lease in June. The September development is different: Brookwood is now publicly identified as the host community, and the project has a disclosed local footprint, investment estimate and community-benefit structure. That distinction is important when separating a new development from a recycled lease announcement.
At full buildout, Delta Forge 2 will join a global wave of increasingly large AI campuses. BitcoinVersus.tech has also tracked 65.1 MW of new AI capacity in Johor and the growing market for multibillion-dollar data-center portfolios.
Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins discusses the company’s AI buildout and hyperscaler demand in this English CNBC interview.
A second English interview goes deeper into Applied Digital’s data-center development strategy.
Applied Digital is documenting its current buildout through this official project feed.
The company also shares broader AI Factory construction progress in another recent update.
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