Will 2025 be the year that data center operator GDS Holdings Ltd. (GDS.US; 9698.HK) formally splits into two or more pieces? The answer increasingly looks like “yes,” following a new report saying the company is exploring a potential IPO for a real estate investment trust (REIT) containing its China-based property assets.
This is a story with quite a few pieces, led by the sensitivity of data center ownership and operation in China that has made the market essentially verboten for foreign operators. But that same Chinese market has also become quite overheated with domestic players, both private and big state-owned telcos. As a result, the domestic market is quite oversupplied at the moment, and no one is making big – if any – money on the business.
On the more positive side, the other big story for this industry is the huge potential for new business as artificial intelligence gains momentum. As increasing amounts of computing gets done remotely, rather than on locally based computers, demand for data center-based capacity is expected to soar from applications that require huge amounts of cloud-based computing power.