한때 무명だった 상장 기업이 신규 구축된 AI 데이터 센터 캠퍼스에 대해 최대 32억 달러 규모의 마스터 리스 계약을 체결하며, 막대한 운영 의무를 상대적으로 작은 자산규모의 기업으로 이전했다.

NEW YORK, Aug. 31, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The scarcest commodity in artificial intelligence right now is not talent or even chips. It is power-ready real estate: sites with energized electrical capacity, cooling, and interconnection rights that can host the enormous compute clusters AI demands, available on the timeline the market needs them. That scarcity is what turns a single, well-located data center into a long-term, contracted cash-flow machine, and it is why a wave of specialized infrastructure operators has raced to lock up power and land ahead of demand. This week, one such operator preparing for a public-market debut disclosed a lease that shows just how large those contracts have become.

Healthy Choice Wellness Corp. (NYSE American: HCWC) announced that Host Digital, a pure-play, vertically integrated digital infrastructure platform focused on AI and high-performance computing (HPC) data centers, had secured a 15-year lease with one of the world's largest privately held cloud infrastructure companies. According to the company's release, the long-term, committed, take-or-pay agreement represents approximately $1.25 billion in contracted revenue over the 15-year base term and covers 43 MW of critical IT load capacity at Host Digital's currently energized facility in northeast Oklahoma, with the lease expected to be supported by a backstop from a U.S.-based, investment-grade global technology company.

The company added that the lease includes annual rent escalators and renewal options, and represents approximately $3.2 billion in contracted revenue if all renewal options are exercised over a 30-year total term. Delivery to the tenant is expected in the first half of 2027, with customary rent-abatement terms for outages in line with other data center leases. HCWC also disclosed that its stockholders had approved all proposals required to complete the previously announced merger with Host Digital, satisfying a key condition to closing. The merger is expected to complete in September, subject to remaining conditions. Host Digital is not starting from the ground up: it is bringing an already energized facility and a contracted anchor tenant into the public vehicle.

“Host Digital is approaching its public market debut with 43 MW of critical IT load committed under a 15-year take-or-pay lease, representing approximately $1.25 billion in base-term contracted revenue,” said Shawn Matthews, who is expected to serve as Chairman of the combined company following closing, in the company's release. “This is the model we intend to scale: secure near-term, energized power; focus on right-sized sites; and contract with strong or credit-enhanced counterparties before deploying significant capital.”

Chief Executive Officer Harmol Samra added that “power-ready sites capable of meeting AI deployment timelines are increasingly scarce,” framing the company's task as converting that advantage into delivered capacity in early 2027 and scaling a repeatable model for leading AI and HPC customers. Investors following the story can track it through Equity Insider.

Why Power-Ready Sites Command Billion-Dollar Contracts

The economics behind the lease reflect a broader reordering of the AI supply chain. Training and running large AI models requires vast, dense clusters of chips, and those clusters need electricity and cooling at a scale that the grid cannot deliver on short notice in most locations. As a result, the bottleneck has shifted from compute to power and the physical shell around it. Operators that already control energized sites, with interconnection rights and utility agreements in place, can offer AI tenants something they cannot easily get elsewhere: capacity on a timeline that matches their deployment plans.

Host Digital's model leans directly into that scarcity. By owning and controlling each facility's core infrastructure, from land, buildings, and interconnection rights to electrical systems and cooling, while tenants control the compute and model layers, the company positions itself as the landlord of the AI era rather than a compute reseller. A 15-year take-or-pay lease with a large cloud counterparty, credit-enhanced by an investment-grade backstop, is the financial expression of that position: long-dated, contracted revenue tied to an asset that is scarce by definition.

Host Digital would be a small, newly public entrant in a field that now includes some of the most closely watched names in technology. The companies below are referenced solely as market and sector context. They are vastly larger and at materially different stages than Host Digital and the combined company, are not peers, competitors, or financial comparables, and their results are not indicative of the combined company's prospects. All figures are approximate and subject to change.

NVIDIA designs the graphics processing units that sit at the center of virtually every large AI deployment, and its chips are the compute that data centers like Host Digital's are built to house. The company has also become a capital force in the sector, having disclosed a large AI investment fund that extends financing across the neocloud and AI-infrastructure landscape. It is referenced to illustrate the demand engine behind AI data centers, an enormously larger company operating at a completely different layer of the stack from a data center landlord. NVIDIA remains the definitional AI-hardware company and a central driver of the buildout that makes power-ready data center capacity valuable. It is referenced only as sector context, and its scale and results are not indicative of the combined company's prospects.

CoreWeave is one of the largest pure-play AI cloud providers in the public markets, renting out GPU compute at scale and reporting a revenue backlog that runs into the tens of billions of dollars. It sits closer to the cloud-and-compute layer than Host Digital's landlord model, but it illustrates the magnitude of contracted AI demand that underpins the entire data center buildout. CoreWeave has become a benchmark name for the neocloud trade, though its capital-intensive, balance-sheet-heavy model carries significant debt and financing considerations. It is referenced only as market and sector context, a far larger company at a different layer of the stack than the combined company, and not as a comparable.

IREN began as a bitcoin-mining operation and has pivoted to AI and HPC infrastructure, converting its power-rich sites into GPU-hosting capacity. It recently landed a multiyear AI cloud contract with a major chipmaker alongside a substantial associated investment tied to scaling toward hundreds of thousands of GPUs, making it one of the more visible miner-to-AI transitions and a useful reference for the power-site-conversion model. IREN's shares have been highly volatile even amid large contract announcements, reflecting the market's sensitivity to financing and delivery risk across the sector. It is referenced only as sector context, a separate company with its own model and risk profile, and not as a comparable to the combined company.

Applied Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: APLD) designs and operates purpose-built HPC data centers and leases capacity to AI customers, a model conceptually close to Host Digital's landlord approach. The company has reported hundreds of megawatts under contract representing billions of dollars in prospective lease revenue, and posted a substantial revenue beat in a recent quarter. Applied Digital is among the more direct public analogues to the contracted-capacity data center model, though it too operates at far greater scale and carries its own financing and execution risks. It is referenced solely as market and sector context, a larger and more established company than the combined company, and not as a peer or financial comparable.

A $1.25 billion lease, with up to $3.2 billion in potential value, is a striking anchor for a company about to enter the public markets through a merger, and it speaks directly to how scarce power-ready AI capacity has become. That said, the combined company will be small and newly public, the merger has rema