One market, two kinds of capacity
Legacy retail vacancy and demand for high-density AI wholesale campuses can coexist. Compare like-for-like rack density, cooling, power delivery and network access before treating empty legacy racks as available AI supply. Track the full chain: reserved → contracted → delivered → energised → occupied → accelerator-equipped → productively utilised. Third-party facility models are estimates, not audited project disclosures.
25 SEPTEMBER 2026 · MARKET EVIDENCE
Horinger shows simultaneous expansion and delivery risk.
SINNET / 光环新网 (300383.SZ) approved up to RMB1.265bn of additional investment in its Horinger intelligent-compute project, taking planned investment to about RMB2.5bn and planned IT load to 90–120MW. The project is designed for 7,000–10,000 cabinets, PUE below 1.2 and high-power liquid-cooled deployments.
The same filing package says the external 110kV supply plan is not yet approved, bank financing may account for up to 70%, and the earlier project timetable was affected by pre-approval cycles and market changes. This is mixed evidence: stronger planned capacity and stated customer demand, paired with concrete energisation, approval and financing dependencies.
Entity check: this is SINNET’s project. It is separate from GDS’s own Horinger programme.
SINNET additional-investment filing ↗ SINNET feasibility report ↗
VNET and GDS now have a dedicated AIDC comparison.
Compare contracted demand, delivery, utilisation, economics, financing and emerging national-infrastructure integration using company-reported definitions.
The role in the system
Operators, facility technology suppliers and captive developers.
Capacity creates value when it is energised, accepted by customers and earning an adequate return.
Companies in this layer
VNET · GDS · Huawei · ByteDance
Names identify research roles, not a claim that every company has a partnership with every other company.
What would strengthen the thesis?
Evidence of grid-secured delivery, customer move-ins and cash return per site.
What would weaken it?
Technical progress that fails to improve usable output or economic returns; delays, costs or commercial friction that prevent the value test being met.
Architecture notes
AIDC physical architecture
AI hardware increasingly determines rack density, liquid cooling, power topology, fault domains and modular construction. MW is not automatically AI-ready MW.
Follow the evidence
22 SEPTEMBER 2026 · RESEARCH UPDATE
Track who delivers the capacity
Alibaba’s expansion raises the importance of its procurement choices. Self-build, leasing, partnerships, geography and the capacity baseline determine the addressable opportunity for third-party AIDC providers.