According to SemiAnalysis estimates, the total capacity of China’s existing data centers exceeds 24 gigawatts, and another 20 gigawatts are under implementation. Bitbeats account for about one-fifth of the country’s operating capacity — TikTok’s owner is the country’s largest tenant and one of the main drivers of the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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SemiAnalysis’s assessment is based on monitoring data from more than 1,000 facilities operated by more than 60 companies in China. Bitbeats lease nearly all data center space. The company’s AI products include Doubao, an assistant with hundreds of millions of users, and Seedance, a video generator. As a private company, ByteDance does not disclose financial data, but its listed competitors have increased their capital expenditures significantly: in the second quarter, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu invested a total of US$20 billion, double the figure in the same period last year. In the same quarter, the free cash flow of China’s three major technology giants all turned negative for the first time.
China’s total existing data center capacity exceeds 24GW; the company’s analytical model also takes into account projects in the implementation phase (approximately 20GW) and announced projects (another 30GW). By comparison, by the end of 2026, the US data center capacity is expected to reach 56 GW; Asia Pacific (excluding China) – 15 GW; Europe, Africa and the Middle East – 14 GW. Notably, vacancy rates for traditional facilities in China remain high – an industry historically tied to telecoms, with one-third of the country’s data center capacity still owned by three state-owned telecom players. Many of these data centers were built to rent out a small number of low-power racks to individual customers and are not equipped to handle the high power required by AI servers. New facilities leased by cloud operators to support artificial intelligence are filling up faster. “In the age of artificial intelligence, rents are pouring in. Outdated facilities for retail customers are not part of the process”,” semi-analysis pointed out.
Chip shortages remain a limiting factor. Based on results for the first half of 2026, Chinese customers are filling new data center space at a lower-than-expected rate — there aren’t enough Chinese or imported chips. During this period, China’s AI computing power increased by 595 Eflops, compared with 802 Eflops in the second half of 2025, according to Goldman Sachs. According to statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of the end of June, the total capacity of AI computing equipment reached 2,185 EFLOPS, an increase of 177% compared with the same period last year. In terms of AI tasks, Goldman Sachs estimates that new capacity will reach 0.7GW in the first half of the year – and from 2025 to 2028, the average annual growth rate of China’s data center service demand will be 20%.
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