Inside Applied Digital: Speed, Scale, and the 600-MW Leap Forward with Wes Cummins

Dec 10, 2025

Wes Cummins, the Founder and CEO of Applied Digital, shares his extraordinary journey from a potato farm in Idaho to leading the charge in AI-optimized data centers. He discusses how early investments in power and supply chain gave his company a competitive edge amid a tech boom fueled by AI demand. Wes highlights the transformation of rural America into digital hubs, creating jobs and economic growth. Excited by innovations like liquid cooling and the future landscape of GPU utilization, he has bold plans for sustainable growth by 2035.

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ANECDOTE

From Potato Farm To Data Centers

Wes Cummins grew up on a 200-person Idaho potato farm and left to pursue tech investing.
He later founded Applied Digital and shifted from Bitcoin mining to building GPU-optimized data centers in rural America.

ANECDOTE

Early GPU Rollout In North Dakota

Applied Digital began running GPUs in Jamestown, North Dakota and had over 1,000 H100s online by July 2023.
The company pivoted from small HPC plans to designing hundreds of megawatts facilities after seeing demand surge.

INSIGHT

Designing To The GPU Roadmap

Cummins designed facilities around NVIDIA's roadmap and partnered with NVIDIA and HPE Cray teams.
That alignment let Applied Digital activate a large Blackwell-optimized facility quickly in 2024.

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In this episode, Wes Cummins, Founder and CEO of Applied Digital, shares how a journey that began on a 200-person Idaho potato farm led to building some of the largest AI-optimized data center campuses in the world. From early days as a tech investor to pioneering high-density infrastructure in America’s rural heartland, Wes offers an inside look at the speed, scale, and conviction required to stay ahead in the AI era.

Today’s guest, Wes Cummins, leads Applied Digital—a company transforming small agricultural towns into next-generation digital infrastructure hubs. His path from semiconductor investing to deploying hundreds of megawatts of high-performance compute shows a rare blend of foresight, grit, and relentless execution.

Wes explains how Applied Digital’s early bet on AI-class data centers, tight partnerships with Nvidia and hyperscalers, and rapid-build design cycles created a true competitive edge. He breaks down why the industry underestimated the real bottleneck—not GPUs, but power-dense data center capacity—and how Applied Digital moved years ahead of the curve by securing supply chain, power, cooling, and land long before demand went parabolic. Wes also pulls back the curtain on building in rural America, highlighting how these projects create high-quality jobs, transform school districts, and generate new economic engines for communities long overlooked by the digital economy.

With a passion for innovation, Wes shares what excites him most—from liquid cooling and 800-volt power distribution to 5+ gigawatt campuses and the push toward 100% GPU utilization across training and inference. His underdog culture, obsession with solving hard problems, and commitment to future-proof engineering reveal the mindset behind Applied Digital’s rapid ascent.

From massive-scale buildouts to leadership lessons, this episode is packed with insight for anyone building, investing in, or simply fascinated by the infrastructure powering the AI revolution.

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