Artificial-intelligence chip giant NVIDIA Corp is joining other investors in a $160 million financing round for APPLIED DIGITAL CORP, a company that operates data centers and is building a business leasing out computing power for AI.
U.S.-listed shares of the company rose 50% in premarket trading.
Investors in the deal include Nvidia and real-estate firm Related Companies, Applied Digital Chief Executive Wes Cummins said. The deal will bring in capital for Applied Digital via a purchase of new shares from the Nasdaq-listed company, which had a market value of more than $500 million as of Wednesday’s close.
Other companies in the arena, including CoreWeave, an AI cloud-computing business, have drawn investments from Nvidia and seen their valuations rise in recent months. CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion in a funding round earlier this year.
Applied Digital builds and leases out data-center space to others. More recently, it has also started an AI cloud-computing operation fueled by Nvidia’s chips.
“We have been doing a lot with Nvidia, and I think we’re unique in that we have both the cloud aspect and the data center build-out,” Cummins said. “I think both are important to them.”
Applied Digital will use the money to fund the company’s growth and to help underpin planned debt-financing deals, Cummins said. The company is seeking debt financing for a major data-center project in North Dakota, as well as to expand its cloud-computing business.
Nvidia has scaled up its investment activity amid the AI boom, supporting the ecosystem of companies that use its chips and giving it insight into the cutting edge of AI development. The company more than tripled the number of its investments last year compared with the year before.
Among its most recent investments, Nvidia took part in a $100 million funding round this week for Sakana AI, a Japanese AI research company.
As part of the Applied Digital deal, a private placement, the company agreed to issue around 49 million shares of its common stock at $3.24 a share, its closing price on Tuesday.
Shares of the company have been volatile this week, falling more than 13% Tuesday amid a rout in AI-related stocks. They rose by nearly 3% in trading Wednesday.