(Reuters) – Australia’s Macquarie will invest up to $5 billion in Applied Digital’s AI data centers and will take a 15% stake in the company, the technology company said on Tuesday, sending its shares up over 15% in premarket trading.
Providers of computing infrastructure like Applied Digital have been seeing heavy investment from companies looking to train their own AI models and get ahead of competitors.
Macquarie’s asset management arm has agreed to invest up to $900 million in a data center campus that Applied Digital is developing in North Dakota.
It also has the right of first refusal to invest an additional $4.1 billion in future company data centers for 30 months, Dallas, Texas-based Applied Digital said.
The company’s chief executive, Wes Cummins (NYSE:), said the deal provides the company with enough equity to construct data centers with high power demands.
The new funding will be used to repay debt Applied Digital took on to build the facilities in North Dakota and will allow it to recover over $300 million of its equity investment in them, the firm said.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news earlier in the day.
Applied Digital’s shares have more than tripled in the past two years as investors bet on AI firms and data center providers to bring strong levels of growth.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:) said earlier this month it would invest around $80 billion in AI data centers in fiscal 2025 to meet growing computational needs.
Applied Digital is set to report its second-quarter results on Tuesday after the markets close.
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