Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) primarily generates its revenue by operating centralized digital infrastructure campuses and providing dedicated computing services designed for high-performance workloads across the North American region.

It recently signed an additional facility lease for a new campus and secured supplemental credit financing for ongoing construction, while reporting an operating margin of -45% for the quarter ended May 31, 2026.

IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) earns the majority of its ongoing revenue by managing vertically integrated data center facilities and actively mining digital assets across its international infrastructure footprint.

While integrating a newly acquired European data center developer and closing the purchase of cloud software provider Mirantis, it recorded an operating margin of -452% for the quarter ended June 30, 2026.

Revenue serves as a primary starting point for investors to evaluate a corporation's ability to attract paying clients and generate gross business volume before standard operational expenses, local taxes, or daily administrative costs are finally subtracted. For neocloud operations such as Applied Digital and IREN, revenue growth is essential to understanding if their costly artificial intelligence infrastructure buildouts are paying off.

$60.7 million (quarter ended Aug. 31, 2024)

$52.8 million (quarter ended Sept. 30, 2024)

$63.9 million (quarter ended Nov. 30, 2024)

$116.1 million (quarter ended Dec. 31, 2024)

$52.9 million (quarter ended Feb. 28, 2025)

$144.8 million (quarter ended March 31, 2025)

$38.0 million (quarter ended May 31, 2025)

$187.3 million (quarter ended June 30, 2025)

$64.2 million (quarter ended Aug. 31, 2025)

$240.3 million (quarter ended Sept. 30, 2025)

$126.6 million (quarter ended Nov. 30, 2025)

$184.7 million (quarter ended Dec. 31, 2025)

$126.6 million (quarter ended Feb. 28, 2026)

$144.8 million (quarter ended March 31, 2026)

$258.7 million (quarter ended May 31, 2026)

$137.2 million (quarter ended June 30, 2026)

Data source: Company filings. Data as of Sept. 4, 2026.

When it comes to neocloud providers such as Applied Digital and IREN, understanding revenue trends is essential to investing in these companies. A neocloud's massive, debt-fueled costs to build AI data centers means they must achieve top-line sales growth, or their business could collapse.

That's why it's important to unpack IREN's recent trend of declining quarterly revenue. The company decided to shift away from mining cryptocurrency and focus on the high-growth AI infrastructure market. This caused its crypto sales to fall.

In IREN's 2026 fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30, its crypto mining revenue dropped to $66.7 million compared to $111.2 million in the previous year. That said, its fiscal Q4 AI cloud sales took off, hitting $70.5 million, up from $33.6 million in the year prior. So while overall revenue dropped from fiscal Q3, it's experiencing strong growth in AI. That's the trend investors want to see.

Applied Digital's situation is more straightforward. As a landlord to AI companies, it just needs to sign lease agreements that grant it long-term revenue predictability, while tenants bear the brunt of outfitting data centers with the AI hardware. The skyrocketing sales in its fiscal fourth quarter, ended May 31, demonstrates it is gaining traction in this arena.

Before you buy stock in Applied Digital, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Applied Digital wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut are built for long-term growth and could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $421,997!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,413,876!*

That performance is why people listen. With a track record of beating the S&P 500 by nearly 5x, Stock Advisor offers a distinct advantage. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built for the long haul.

*Stock Advisor returns as of September 6, 2026.

Robert Izquierdo has positions in Iren. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Analyzing Applied Digital vs. IREN: Accelerating Upward Trajectories vs. Sequential Contractions in Quarterly Revenue Generation was originally published by The Motley Fool