Meta의 Applied Digital AI 캠퍼스 임대 계약이 루이지애나 채권 최대 46억 달러의 담보가 될 수 있다.

**Key Takeaways**

- A Louisiana public authority's Nov. 9 meeting packet includes a proposed agreement for up to $4.6 billion of revenue bonds to fund Applied Digital's Delta Forge 1 campus, to be repaid from its Meta lease.

- Borrowing against Meta's lease could cost Applied Digital far less than the neocloud debt market, where Steve Eisman says a 15% cost of debt makes AI data centers prohibitively expensive.

- Applied Digital's total debt rose to $5.1 billion in fiscal 2026, and its diluted share count has nearly quintupled since fiscal 2022, so a cheaper way to pay for construction matters.

- The bonds are only proposed. There is no rate, no maturity and no final approval yet, so the terms are what to watch.

Applied Digital (APLD) may have found a way to pay for its Louisiana AI campus on the strength of its tenant, Meta Platforms (META). A Louisiana public authority's latest meeting packet proposes up to $4.6 billion of bonds for the project, to be repaid from Meta's rent.

For a company that has paid for its growth with debt and new stock, that's a big deal.

**What's in the Louisiana packet**

A poster on Reddit's r/stocks flagged a 131-page packet for the Nov. 9 meeting of the England Economic and Industrial Development District. It includes a proposed agreement for:

- Up to $4.6 billion of revenue bonds, which the district would sell to institutional investors to pay for building Delta Forge 1, a 300 MW campus in Boyce, La.

- Payments on those bonds from Applied Digital's project subsidiary, with Louisiana taxpayers responsible for none of it.

- A separate property-tax arrangement, with about $575 million of negotiated payments through 2052.

Meta is the campus's tenant on a 15-year lease that the poster puts at about $7.5 billion. Spread evenly, that's about $500 million a year, close to the $611 million of revenue Applied Digital booked in all of fiscal 2026 (the year ended May 2026). Analysts expect leases like this one to push its revenue sharply higher.

I wouldn't expect a financing deal to move those estimates. The bigger question for shareholders is what that revenue costs to build.

**The cost of money matters**

The cost of capital matters a lot in AI right now. Steve Eisman, the investor made famous by *The Big Short*, pointed on the Nov. 6 episode of *The Real Eisman Playbook* to CoreWeave's debt being repriced from a yield of 9% to 15%. He said: "At a cost of debt of 15%, building AI data centers becomes prohibitively expensive." CoreWeave's bonds have since climbed to yields over 17%.

A revenue bond changes what lenders are pricing. Bondholders would be repaid from Meta's rent, so what they would mostly be judging is a 15-year lease from a company S&P rates AA-. S&P did cut its outlook on that rating to negative on Oct. 30 over Meta's spending, but that is still investment-grade credit, a long way from the neocloud borrowers Eisman describes.

Meta has a stake in this too. It guides 2026 capital expenditures, including finance-lease principal, to $135 billion to $145 billion, and at Sept. 30 it had $355.7 billion of signed leases that hadn't yet started. Each of those needs a landlord who can raise the money to build, and a way to borrow against Meta's own lease makes that much easier.

Applied Digital could use the help. Its total debt jumped from $911 million in fiscal 2025 to $5.1 billion in fiscal 2026. It has also sold plenty of stock along the way. The post's main selling point is that Applied Digital wouldn't need to issue billions of dollars of new shares for Delta Forge 1. That matters to shareholders because its diluted share count rose from 57.1 million in fiscal 2022 to 275 million in fiscal 2026.

Of course, no new shares still means new debt. The full $4.6 billion would nearly double what Applied Digital owed at the end of fiscal 2026, if none of it replaces other financing already planned.

**It's a proposal until the bonds are sold**

The $4.6 billion is a ceiling. The bonds haven't been sold, there is no rate or maturity yet, more approvals are needed, and the poster says Applied Digital's own proposed guarantees deserve scrutiny. Other investors in the thread pointed out that the structure moves the risk onto the Meta lease and the build timeline: one tenant on the campus, and debt that must be paid either way. Still, the district has backed Applied Digital before. It approved the project itself in April, NPR reported.

The bottom line: if Applied Digital can sell these bonds at a rate that reflects Meta's credit, it can build Delta Forge 1 without another round of dilution and without paying neocloud rates. That would be a real win for the stock. The poster also counts three unfinanced campuses with Meta as the tenant, on $20.2 billion of leases, so Louisiana could serve as the template for the other two.

The number to watch is the rate. Until the district approves the agreement and the bonds actually price, Applied Digital has a financing route with no price tag yet.