GDS Holdings Ltd (GDS)

GDS Holdings Limited is a Cayman Islands exempted company, incorporated in 2006 and headquartered in Shanghai, that develops and operates high-performance data centers in China. Its ADSs trade on Nasdaq under "GDS" and its ordinary shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under "9698." It began in 2001 as an IT service provider focused on business continuity and disaster recovery, and moved into building its own data centers in 2009. It also holds a minority equity interest, about 19.9% as of the report date, in DayOne, a Singapore-headquartered data center platform that was formerly its international business and is now accounted for under the equity method. STT GDC, now through STT Garnet, is a long-term strategic investor.

The company provides colocation and managed services in carrier- and cloud-neutral data centers. It also offers a service platform that helps enterprise customers manage hybrid cloud environments across private servers and public clouds. As of December 31, 2025, it had 668,283 sqm of net floor area in service, 93.0% committed and 75.5% utilized, and 73,994 sqm under construction, 66.1% pre-committed. It operated 90 self-developed data centers, plus build-operate-transfer sites and a small amount of leased third-party capacity, and had about 3.7 gigawatts of developable resources for future use. Self-developed facilities feature 2N or distributed N+1 power redundancy, average power density of about 2.34 kW/sqm and an average PUE of around 1.23 for qualifying newer sites. In 2025 net revenue was RMB11,432.3 million, net income from continuing operations was RMB959.4 million, and adjusted EBITDA was RMB5,403.5 million. In 2025 the company sold data center assets to an ABS vehicle listed in Shanghai and to the GDS C-REIT.

GDS served 989 customers at year-end 2025. They include PRC and global hyperscale cloud providers, large internet companies, financial institutions, telecommunications carriers, IT service providers and large domestic and multinational corporations. Hyperscale and large internet customer contracts generally run three to ten years, and financial institution and enterprise contracts one to five years. Customers are billed for the services they use, subject to a minimum billable amount that typically steps up during move-in periods of 6 to 24 months for anchor customers and 3 to 12 months for others. Established markets are in and around Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chengdu/Chongqing, which hold latency-sensitive workloads. Newer growth markets such as Ningxia, Shaoguan and Inner Mongolia serve large-scale computing. Demand is driven by cloud computing, AI, 5G, big data and supportive PRC digital economy policies.

The company's operating model covers sourcing sites, building, marketing, and delivering services. It sources land, buildings and power capacity years ahead of development, by acquiring or leasing property, leasing wholesale capacity from third parties, or acquiring existing data centers. It uses in-house design and a modular build-out with developers, contractors and suppliers, which lets it phase capital spending to match demand. It seeks pre-commitments from anchor customers before construction. It deliberately leaves capacity on some sites for financial and enterprise customers that buy with shorter lead times. Quarterly churn averaged about 0.9% in 2025.