So here's a fun puzzle: what happens when a company reports quarterly revenue that more than doubles year-over-year, crushes analyst estimates, and actually turns a profit when everyone expected a loss? If you guessed "the stock goes up," you'd be wrong, at least in the case of Applied Digital Corp (APLD) on Thursday.
The company, which builds and operates data centers, especially for AI workloads, dropped its third-quarter numbers after the bell Wednesday. They were good. Really good. Revenue hit $126.6 million, which was miles ahead of the $76.56 million Wall Street was looking for. That's a 139% jump from the same period last year. On the bottom line, they managed adjusted earnings of nine cents per share. Analysts had braced for a loss of 10 cents. The driver? Growth in their high-performance computing (HPC) hosting business.
Yet, when the premarket opened Thursday, the stock was down more than 5%. Sometimes the market is a moody beast that doesn't reward even obvious success. Broader futures were also slightly negative, but that doesn't fully explain the slide for a stock that just posted such explosive growth.
Maybe the market is looking past the quarterly print to the bigger story. CEO Wes Cummins is certainly focused on the future. On the earnings call, he emphasized the company's operational edge, particularly its 100-megawatt direct-to-chip liquid-cooled data center. "We believe that's what matters to our customers — turning power into live AI capacity," Cummins stated. He added that the company is finally seeing the "earnings power" of its platform materialize.
The construction pipeline seems healthy, too. Work at the company's North Dakota campuses is on schedule. One facility, ELN-2 at Polaris Forge 1, is fully up and running. Two more 150-megawatt facilities are moving along. Cummins said the demand environment is intense, noting a "clear acceleration" in need for AI capacity and that "hyperscalers"—the giant cloud companies—are acting "as aggressively as we have ever seen."
So, with great numbers and a bullish CEO, why the stock drop? Part of the answer might be hanging over the market in the form of short sellers. Short interest in Applied Digital has dipped slightly, from 79.02 million to 78.75 million shares. But roughly 30.63% of the company's publicly available shares are still being bet against. At recent trading volumes, it would take short sellers about 4.77 days to buy back all their borrowed shares and close their positions. That's a significant amount of potential buying pressure if the stock starts to rise, but it also represents a persistent layer of skepticism that can weigh on price action, even on good news.
In the end, Applied Digital delivered the kind of quarter growth investors dream about. The market's initial reaction, however, was a yawn followed by a sell-off. It's a reminder that in the short term, stock prices aren't always a simple report card on past performance. Sometimes, they're a bet on future uncertainties, weighed down by the ghosts of skeptics past.
