GDS Holdings Limited

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for GDS Holdings Limited Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After management prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Today's conference call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to your host, Ms. Laura Chen, Head of Investor Relations for the company. Please go ahead, Laura.

Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the third quarter 2025 earnings conference call of GDS Holdings Limited. The company's results were issued via Newswire services earlier today and are posted online. A pre-presentation of which you will be able to join this conference call can be viewed and downloaded from our IR website at investors.gdsservices.com. Leading today's call is Mr. William Huang, GDS founder, chairman, and CEO, who will provide an overview of our business strategy and performance. Mr. Dan Newman, GDS CFO, will then review the financial and operating results. Before we continue, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, the company's results may be materially different from the views expressed today. Further information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties is included in the company's prospectus as filed with the US SEC. The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable law. Please also note that GDS earnings press release and this conference call include discussions of unaudited gap financial information as well as unaudited non-gap financial measures. GDS press release contains reconciliation of the unaudited non-gap measures to the unaudited most directly comparable gap measures. I will now turn over the call to GDS founder, chairman, and speaker. Go ahead, William.

Thank you. Hello everyone, this is William. Thank you for joining us on today's call. During the third quarter, our revenue increased by 10.2% and our adjusted EBITDA increased by 11.4% year on year, maintaining the healthy growth trend since our business began to recover last year. During 3Q25, our growth Additional area utilized was around 23,000 square meters. We are on track to achieve our highest every year of moving. We continue to deliver the long-term backlog. In addition, we are now delivering the 40,000 square meter or 152 megawatt order, which we won in the first quarter of this year. By being selective with new business, we have successfully shortened the book-to-build period and brought down our backlog. Nonetheless, we still have visibility for over 70,000 square meters of moving from the backlog next year. Our total new bookings for the first nine months in 75,000 square meters are all 240 megawatts. We expect to achieve nearly 300 megawatts for the full year, which is a big step up from the level of the past few years. Around 65% of our bookings in 2025 are AI-related. Nonetheless, AI demand in China is still at a very early stage. If we look at the big picture, the domestic tech industry has reached a critical juncture with major players making unprecedented financial commitment to AI infrastructure. This marks a definitive end to the previous a downturn and signals the beginning of a robust recovery for the data center sector. All of our major customers are committed to the massive scale of this new investment cycle, with CapEx plans of hundreds of billions, underscoring the intensity of the new AI arms race. leading local chip companies are making continuous development progress in terms of performance, efficiency, and capacity. The growth of the domestic chip segment will secure the long-term growth of the AI infrastructure industry. We have unwavering confidence in the AI demand to to come based on the development and the ramp up of domestic technologies. We believe that new bookings in the coming years could be better. And this is what we are preparing for in our strategic plan. There are two essential ingredients to win big in AI. Power the land and access to capital. We have already secured around 900 megawatts of powered land in and around Tier 1 markets, which is suitable for AI demand, particularly for AI inference. In addition, based on our communications with our customers, we are in the process of securing more powered land in complementary locations and we believe that 900 megawatts will not be enough. On the financing side, we recently completed the first IPO of a data center REIT in China. The transaction was a huge success. We intend to inject more assets in the REIT next year. and establishing a continuous pipeline of asset monetization. The REIT gives us a significant competitive advantage in terms of accessing capital from the domestic equity market. It enables us to monetize assets efficiently, repeatedly, and at the lowest possible cost. The China market is at an inflection point. The outlook for the data center industry is very exciting. Our market position is as strong as ever. Over the past few years, we have taken a conservative approach. We improved our asset utilization and significantly strengthened our balance sheet. Going forward, we will maintain our financial discipline while at the same time taking a more aggressive approach to new business. I will now pass on to Dan for the financial and operating review.