GDS Holdings Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by for GDS Holdings Limited's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to your host, Ms. Laura Chen, Head of Investor Relations for the company. Please go ahead, Laura.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first quarter of 2026 earnings conference call of GDS Holdings Limited. The company's results were issued via GDS services earlier today and are posted online. A summary presentation, which we will refer to during this conference call, can be viewed and downloaded from our RIO website at investorsgdsservices.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 Divigation 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 risk uncertainties is included in the company's prospectus as filed with the U.S. 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 earlier this press release And this conference call can include discussions of unaudited debt financial information as well as unaudited non-debt financial measures. GDS press release contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-debt measures to the unaudited most directly comparable debt measures. I'll now turn the call over to GDS founder, chairman, and CEO, Mr. William Huang. Please go ahead, William.

Hello, everyone. This is William. Thank you for joining us on today's call. Over the past few quarters, we have seen a resurgence in data center demand, driven by AI. We believe this is the beginning of a multi-year growth story, supported by increasing availability of domestic chips. Customers are planning their future deployments at unprecedented data scale with a high degree of conviction. As market leaders, GDS is well prepared to address these opportunities to the fullest extent. We have the trust of all the key customers, a multi-gigawatt development pipeline in strategic locations, and a very strong balance sheet. Up to the end of 1Q26, our total bookings stood at 1.8 gigawatts. In our three-year business plan, we target adding 500 megawatts to 800 megawatts of new bookings every year with the potential to do more. To deliver this capacity, We are prepared to commit RMB 30 billion to RMB 50 billion of new investment over the next three years. The economics of the data center business in China is solid, and this new investment will create significant value for our shareholders. On the last earning call, we announced a sales target for 2026 of at least 500 megawatts. In the year today, we have already done over 340 megawatts of new bookings, and we are still being selective. We are well on track to reach or exceed our full-year target. We have won significant new orders from all of our largest customers for deployments across the whole of our platform, including the new markets. For the hyperscale business, customers are planning gigawatt-scale deployments in single clusters. When they sign new sales agreements with us, they commit to a certain amount of capacity, which we disclose as bookings, and ask us to reserve the rest of the site for their subsequent phases. In a year today, total new bookings plus reservations comes to over one gigawatt. The reservation give us near certainty of winning follow-on orders within the next one or two years. In order to fulfill our customer requirements, we expanded our platform to new locations which can accommodate the largest AI deployments. These new locations integrated well with our platform in established market, enabling us to serve diversified customer requirements. Anticipating the demand trend, we increased our secured land bank to nearly 4 gigawatts. Typically, we are purchasing land from the government exclusively for our data center development. As we obtain customer commitment, we will be granted a power quota for this site. We synchronized the timing of construction with new bookings and fixed moving schedules. Over the past 15 months, we initiated over 1,000 square meters or 400 megawatts of new construction, which is almost entirely pre-committed. Our backlog has increased to over 200,000 square meters or almost 600 megawatts, most of which will become billable within the next six to eight quarters. As this occurs, our growth will start to accelerate. AI in China is a transformational opportunity. We are super motivated to support this development and will commit all the resource requirements to the expansion of our AI infrastructure platform. I will now pass on to Dan for the financial and operating review.