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Applied Digital’s Delta Forge 1 has had a name since January 2026. It got a $7.5 billion hyperscaler tenant in April. What it did not have — until Louisiana Economic Development announced on May 26 — was a publicly disclosed address.

The answer: Rapides Parish, central Louisiana, near Boyce. The location ends more than four months of deliberate secrecy from a company that broke ground on one of the largest AI infrastructure commitments in US history without naming the state it was building in.

The Deal Numbers

The lease signed in April 2026 is structured as a take-or-pay agreement — the hyperscaler pays whether or not it runs workloads — with an unnamed investment-grade US hyperscaler. The terms:

• Lease value: $7.5 billion over 15 years
• Annual implied revenue: ~$500 million/year
• Capacity covered: 300 megawatts of critical IT load
• Applied Digital backlog after signing: above $23 billion

Applied Digital’s stock jumped 9-14% on the April lease announcement, before the site’s location was known. The jump was driven entirely by the contract structure — volume, duration, and counterparty credit quality — not geography.

What Delta Forge 1 Is

The campus covers approximately 300 acres and is purpose-built for large-scale AI training and inference workloads, using Applied Digital’s closed-loop cooling technology for high-density compute density. Two initial facilities deliver the 300MW of IT load. Direct grid access is part of the site selection.

• Capital investment: $3.6 billion
• Land: ~300 acres in Rapides Parish
• Jobs: 200 full-time positions at 150% of state average wage; 1,000+ construction jobs at peak
• Start: site development began January 2026
• Initial operations: mid-2027

The mystery hyperscaler is broadly consistent with the description “investment-grade US hyperscaler” that could absorb 300MW of collocated compute — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the obvious candidates, each of which has been actively locking long-duration AI infrastructure capacity ahead of demand.

The Structural Pattern

The Delta Forge 1 lease reflects a template playing out across the US data center market: hyperscalers committing to decade-plus take-or-pay arrangements before the underlying facilities exist, and before announcing the commitment publicly. Applied Digital kept the April lease counterparty confidential. Louisiana ED disclosed the physical location first; the tenant name remains sealed.

For Applied Digital, the deal is transformational. Its total contracted revenue backlog exceeding $23 billion on a company that was primarily a crypto mining infrastructure operator three years ago represents one of the sharpest pivot trajectories in the sector.

Louisiana qualified Applied Digital for the state’s data center sales and use tax exemption under Act 730 of the 2024 legislative session. Available land, direct energy infrastructure access, and a developing workforce pipeline were cited as the competitive factors that beat other southern markets.