Shares of Applied Digital Corporation (APLD) surged 12% on Friday after the Texas bitcoin mining and data center firm announced its third deal in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The partnership will use Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) supercomputers built with NVIDIA H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) to enhance Applied Digital’s AI Cloud service. According to CEO Wes Cummins, this comes at a pivotal time for the company as they expand their current capacity pipeline of up to 200MW for their HPC data centers.
This partnership will efficiently support critical workloads such as AI, machine learning, rendering, and HPC tasks involving digital modeling and simulation, said Cummins in a press release. Applied Digital has already announced two hosting deals for AI loads that could bring in as much as $820 million in revenues over the next 36 months.
The move comes as bitcoin miners are increasingly looking into AI to shore up their revenues, which have been hurt by a slump in bitcoin prices and increased network difficulty. Earlier today, Canada’s Hive Blockchain (HIVE) detailed a strategy to train enterprise large language models with its GPU fleet.
HPE recently announced its supercomputing-as-a-service offering, which allows customers to access supercomputing on the cloud, without building the infrastructure, to train and operate large language models. HPE is one of the last companies standing in the supercomputing arena, along with tech giants like Google, IBM (IBM), Intel (INTC) and Nvidia (NVDA).