ByteDance grabs one-fifth of China’s data centre capacity as AI drives infrastructure boom
ByteDance accounts for roughly one-fifth of China’s delivered data centre capacity, making the TikTok owner the country’s largest tenant and a main driver of its artificial intelligence buildout, according to new estimates by research firm SemiAnalysis. The estimate comes from the firm’s tracking of more than 1,000 facilities in China operated by over 60 companies. ByteDance rents nearly all of…
ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, holds approximately one-fifth of China's data centre capacity, making it the country's largest tenant and a key driver of the nation's AI infrastructure development, according to research from SemiAnalysis. The firm's analysis of over 1,000 facilities operated by more than 60 companies in China reveals that ByteDance rents virtually its entire data centre footprint. Its AI offerings include Doubao, a popular AI assistant, and Seedance, a video generation tool.
While ByteDance's financials remain private as a private entity, its competitors' spending on data centre infrastructure has surged. Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, and Baidu collectively invested $20 billion in capital expenditure during the second quarter, more than double the figure from the same period last year. Despite this increased spending, all three companies reported negative free cash flow for the first time on record in the same quarter.
According to SemiAnalysis, China boasts over 24 gigawatts (GW) of delivered data centre capacity. The firm also tracks approximately 20GW in the pipeline and another 30GW in announced projects. For perspective, the United States is projected to have 56GW of capacity by the end of 2026, compared to around 15GW in the rest of Asia-Pacific and 14GW in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
This rapid expansion in China's data centre infrastructure is occurring alongside high vacancy rates in older facilities. The industry's origins in the telecom sector partly explain this discrepancy, as China's three state-owned telecommunications companies still control about a third of the nation's data centre capacity. Many of these older facilities were designed to accommodate small numbers of low-power racks for individual customers and are ill-suited to meet the power demands of modern AI servers.
Newer facilities leased to cloud and AI companies are filling more rapidly, as SemiAnalysis notes, "The AI era is wholesale. The legacy retail stock is not participating."
Written by urgent.news from South China Morning Post's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
