China Data Centers: Highlights from China AI Computing Industry Ecological Development Conference

Research evidence excerpt

China Data Centers: Highlights from China AI Computing Industry Ecological Development Conference

Equity Research

2 July 2026 | 6:17PM HKT

China Data Centers: Highlights from China AI Computing Industry

Ecological Development Conference

We recently attended the China AI Computing Industry Ecological Development Timothy Zhao

+852-2978-2673 |

Conference, where representatives from a variety of industry players (e.g. data timothy.zhao@gs.com

Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C.

center operators, hyperscalers, token routing platforms) and independent research

Ronald Keung, CFA

institutes (e.g. CAICT, KZ Consulting) delivered presentations. Key topics included +852-2978-0856 |

national computing power network, GW-scale data center clusters, domestic chip ronald.keung@gs.comGoldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C.

ramp-up and limitations, token operations, etc. Eunice Liu

+852-2978-7472 | eunice.liu@gs.com

GS takes: We think China’s national computing power network may reshape the Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C.

competitive landscape and geographic footprint of the China data center industry

over the next 5 years; in other words, capital and technology are heavily shifting

toward Western China hubs, while the value proposition of tier-1 city data centers is

shifting toward ultra-low latency hot compute, edge nodes and AI inference. The

emergence of GW-scale computing power clusters implies higher technology and

resource barriers and provides differentiation among data center operators. Within

our China data center coverage, we are Buy rated on VNET, GDS and Range

Intelligent, Neutral rated on Shanghai Athub, and Sell rated on Beijing Sinnet.

We summarize key highlights from the conference below.

Computing power network

n Computing power network as part of China’s core infrastructure