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DayOne's Nasdaq bid leans on one short-video customer
The News
DayOne Data Centers, a Singapore-headquartered developer and operator of hyperscale data centres, filed a registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on October 5, 2026 for an initial public offering of American depositary shares on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol DODC. The preliminary prospectus gives no share count or price range yet. It lists Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, Citigroup and BNP Paribas as underwriters. Revenue rose 238.0% to $512.0 million in the first half of 2026, from $151.5 million a year earlier, and the net loss widened to $77.2 million from $12.6 million. The largest customer, which the filing does not name, accounted for 69.2% of that revenue.
Chandni Melwani
Founder & Editor
Oct 7, 2026 · 2 MIN READ
Know More
- — Scale: 962MW of capacity in service and about 2.3GW of bookings as of September 20, 2026, substantially all of which DayOne expects to deliver by December 31, 2028, with an estimated $11.4bn still to spend after June 30, 2026, per its F-1.
- — Johor, as of September 20, 2026: the Nusajaya Tech Park and Kempas Tech Park campuses hold 47.8% and 34.3% of capacity in service, and 28.8% and 32.5% of bookings.
- — Owners of 5% or more before the offering, on an as-converted basis: Coatue entities 19.5%, Hillhouse entities 19.5%, GDS 19.4%, Achi entities 15.6%.
- — Equity raised so far: $1.9bn in Series A and B financings in 2024, then $1.3bn in 2025 and $3.2bn in 2026 in its Series C.
- — Still blank in the filing: the offering size, the price range, and how the proceeds split between new data-centre projects and working capital.
One customer produced 69.2% of DayOne Data Centers’ revenue in the first half of 2026. The prospectus DayOne filed with the SEC on October 5 describes that customer as “a global technology company with a leading short-form video platform serving a worldwide audience.” The filing gets no closer to a name.
DayOne began in 2022 as a subsidiary of GDS, a Chinese data-centre operator listed on Nasdaq and in Hong Kong, which stopped consolidating it at the end of 2024 and now owns 19.4%. GDS’s chairman and chief executive, William Wei Huang, sits on DayOne’s board. The post-listing articles let him appoint one director whom shareholders cannot remove, for as long as he and his affiliates hold at least 1% of the shares outstanding immediately after the IPO. Malaysia produced 87.0% of first-half revenue.
Five House committee and subcommittee chairs wrote to the Commerce Department on October 30, 2025 asking its Office of Information and Communications Technology and Services to investigate and restrict adversary products in other critical and emerging industries, beyond connected vehicles. Their appendix lists DayOne under AI infrastructure and puts GDS Holdings in the column headed “Chinese Parent / Ownership.” DayOne says it is aware of no action by that office resulting from the letter.
US chip rules already follow Chinese-headquartered buyers abroad, and the House passed a bill in January 2026, the filing says, to extend export controls to “remote access.” DayOne says it generally provides the infrastructure, such as space, power and cooling, rather than the equipment itself, but that such proposals could affect demand or expand to cover its services. It also warns that changes to Treasury’s outbound-investment rules could bar US persons from buying or trading its shares.
Some of the money is already American: Delaware-registered Coatue funds own 19.5%. At an Ohio campus where OpenAI will be the only customer, Nvidia has agreed to guarantee the leases, with its payments capped at $105bn for its initial commitment. DayOne’s listing asks public shareholders to carry its own version of that exposure, with US policy toward China among the risks.
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Room for Disagreement
Concentration this heavy is how a young hyperscale builder starts. DayOne says it secures anchor customer commitments early in its development process, and its bookings of about 2.3GW come primarily from seven global hyperscale and leading technology customers, so the argument runs that the revenue mix widens as booked capacity is delivered. The second-largest customer's share already rose from 12.3% in 2025 to 15.1% in the first half of 2026. On the China link, GDS has not consolidated DayOne since the end of 2024, DayOne describes itself as a platform outside the United States and China, and Delaware-registered Coatue funds hold as large a stake as any shareholder. The narrower point holds anyway: the House letter, the remote-access bill and the outbound-investment warning all come from DayOne's own filing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is DayOne's largest customer?
The prospectus does not name it. It calls the customer 'a global technology company with a leading short-form video platform serving a worldwide audience,' and says geopolitical tensions could affect that customer's business and future deployments, although DayOne does not believe they would affect existing contracts. The second-largest customer produced 15.1% of first-half 2026 revenue.
Why did House committee chairs name DayOne?
On October 30, 2025, the chairs of the House Select Committee on China, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Intelligence Committee, the Homeland Security Committee and a Foreign Affairs subcommittee asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to have the department's Office of Information and Communications Technology and Services investigate and restrict adversary products in other critical and emerging industries, beyond connected vehicles. Their appendix lists DayOne under AI infrastructure, with GDS Holdings in the column headed 'Chinese Parent / Ownership.' GDS had stopped consolidating DayOne at the end of 2024 and held a minority stake. DayOne says it is not aware of any action by that office resulting from the letter.
Can US investors buy DayOne's shares?
DayOne says it does not believe it is a covered foreign person under Treasury's outbound-investment rule, which took effect on January 2, 2025 and excludes publicly traded securities listed on an exchange. It warns that changes to that exception, or the regulations the COINS Act requires, could prohibit US persons from buying or trading its ADSs.
Sources
- DayOne Data Centers Limited, Form F-1 registration statement, filed with the SEC on October 5, 2026: customer concentration, Malaysia revenue share, GDS stake, the Class I director right, the congressional letter, the remote-access bill and the outbound-investment risk factor
- SEC EDGAR filing index for the DayOne F-1, accession 0001193125-26-414188, filing date October 5, 2026
- Letter from five House committee and subcommittee chairs to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, October 30, 2025, whose Appendix I lists DayOne under AI infrastructure, with GDS Holdings under 'Chinese Parent / Ownership'
- Hero photo: Johor Causeway from Malaysia, by Ralff Nestor Nacor (own work), Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped for this page
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence, which applies to the hero photo and the cropped version used here
Chandni Melwani
Chandni Melwani is the founder and editor of New in AI, covering AI agents, M&A, and enterprise adoption. She holds a Master's in Management of Artificial Intelligence from Queen's University and brings a practitioner's perspective from her work in Data and AI leadership.
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