AI frenzy continues as Macquarie commits up to $5B for Applied Digital datacenters
Bubble? What bubble?
Fears of an AI bubble have yet to scare off venture capitalists and private equity firms from pumping billions of dollars into the GPU-packed datacenters at the heart of the machine-learning craze.
Case in point, on Tuesday Macquarie, one of Australia's top financial services firms, revealed plans to inject up to US$5 billion into American datacenter operator Applied Digital to finance the construction of new facilities.
The Dallas, Texas-based operator is a relative newcomer to high-performance computing, though that hasn't stopped it from trying to replicate the successes of its contemporaries.
The biz has followed a similar trajectory to CoreWeave breaking into the HPC services space circa 2022 after a bout of cryptocurrency mining. Like CoreWeave and Lambda, another major rent-a-GPU outfit, Applied offers a variety of datacenter and cloud services powered by Nvidia's chips.
And with Macquarie's investment, which includes an initial $900 million round of funding, Applied plans to move forward with its Ellendale High Performance Computing campus in North Dakota while also recovering roughly $300 million in equity previously invested in the 400-megawatt facility.
The campus is the one of several Applied Digital datacenters that Macquarie intends to plow money into. Under the agreement, the financial services firm has been granted first right of refusal for all future AI datacenters Applied may pursue over the next 30 months up to $4.1 billion.
"At today's build costs, we will have a significant portion of the equity needed to construct over two gigawatts of HPC datacenter capacity, including our Ellendale Campus," Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins said in a statement.
Applied hasn't said when, where, and how many datacenters will ultimately be built, though the press release does seem to suggest that these facilities will be liquid cooled. It is, however, a fairly safe bet that, just like its North Dakota site, future datacenters will utilize Nvidia accelerators — perhaps even its 120 kilowatt liquid-cooled GB200 NVL72 rack systems.
You may recall, Nvidia along with a handful of other investors poured $160 million into Applied Digital back in September to fuel its datacenter build out. It probably doesn't hurt that much of Nvidia's investment is likely to return in the form of GPU orders and AI Enterprise subscription fees.
In exchange for its investment, Macquarie has effectively bought itself a 15 percent stake in Applied HPC business with the datacenter operator retaining the remaining 85 percent share.
"As an owner and manager of datacenter platforms, we see this as a highly attractive opportunity to help build an industry leading HPC datacenter company well positioned in these high growth segments of the market," Anton Moldan, senior managing director at Macquarie, said in a canned statement.
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According to our sibling site The Next Platform investing $1.5 billion in infrastructure — enough to build and network a datacenter with roughly 16,000 H100-class GPUs to rent out — will net you about $5.27 billion in revenues within four years, assuming a decent mix of spot instances and long-term commitments from customers.
Given the estimated return on investment, it's not hard to see why so many capital management firms are clamoring for a piece of the action. It probably doesn't hurt either that GPUs are in such high demand they're now considered fungible. This has enabled datacenters to use them as collateral for massive loans.
In fact, last April Macquarie helped to drive half a billion dollars of debt financing backed by Nvidia GPUs into rival DC operator Lambda.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of this trend has been CoreWeave, which according to Crunchbase raked in $9.9 billion in funding and debt financing in 2024 alone.
Some investment groups now appear to be cutting out the middleman and pursuing datacenter developments. Last fall, US investment giant Blackstone said it would plow £10 billion (US$12 billion) into a massive AI datacenter in northeast England. ®