GDS Brand Guidelines: A 2001 Shanghai Start, a Nasdaq Listing & the DayOne Spin-Off

From bank back-up services to its own campuses.

GDS dates its founding to 2001; Chinese Wikipedia gives 2000. Its press releases carry a Shanghai dateline, and in March 2026 the property news site Mingtiandi described William Huang as the company’s founder, chairman and chief executive. Chinese Wikipedia expands the initials as Global Data Solutions; the Chinese name is Wanguo Shuju.

The company says it began as an IT service provider, offering business-continuity and disaster-recovery services to financial institutions. Its own milestones page splits its history into three stages. From 2001 to 2008 it concentrated on those services and, it says, relied on data centres run by third parties. From 2009 to 2015 it moved into large data centres of its own in key locations, opening three in Kunshan, Chengdu and Shanghai in 2011 and its Shenzhen No.1 data centre in 2014. From 2016 onwards, the page says, it sped up development of what it calls high-performance data centres across China’s main markets.

GDS listed on Nasdaq on 2 November 2016 and on the main board of the Hong Kong stock exchange on 2 November 2020, both Chinese Wikipedia and the company record; it trades as GDS in New York and 9698 in Hong Kong. The milestones page then counts the openings year by year: 15 self-developed data centres in 2020 in Shanghai, Beijing, Kunshan, Langfang and Zhangbei, 26 in 2021 across the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, Inner Mongolia and the Greater Bay Area, and smaller batches since, ending with four in Langfang and Ulanqab listed for 2026.

Colocation, hosting and a neutral pitch.

GDS sells three kinds of service, its website says: colocation, meaning space, power, racks and cooling for customers’ own servers; managed hosting, which covers network, storage, database and disaster-recovery work; and managed cloud, built around a platform it calls CloudMIX for companies that mix private servers with public clouds.

Its standard company description, repeated at the foot of each press release, says its facilities sit in the hubs where demand for such services is concentrated, and that it is carrier- and cloud-neutral, so customers can reach the main telecoms networks and the large Chinese and global public clouds hosted in many of its buildings. The same text lists its customers as hyperscale cloud providers, large internet companies, financial institutions, telecoms carriers, IT service providers and large domestic and multinational companies. Those are the company’s own words. Elsewhere on the site it names three main customer groups, internet and cloud companies, financial services and large enterprises, and says its data centres sit in four key markets.

The website leads with figures. The home page opens on the line “powering ambition” and a strip of four figures: the 2001 founding year, “4 key markets,” the 2016 Nasdaq listing and the 2020 Hong Kong listing. Separate sections cover services, data centres, operations and sustainability, with environmental, social and governance reports for 2023 and 2024 linked from the footer, and an investor site with filings for both exchanges.

How operators present themselves.

Data-centre operators sell something most of their customers never see in person: buildings full of power, cooling and racks, usually in business parks on the edge of a city. Their websites and reports therefore do much of the work of explaining what they own and where it is. In this guide’s set, the companies present themselves through a small number of recurring formats rather than a consumer product.

The first is the campus itself. Operators publish aerial photographs and architectural renderings of their sites, often before a building is finished, together with galleries and short videos. These images are the company’s own material and show the buildings as the operator wants them seen; a rendering of a planned campus is a plan, not a finished site.

The second is the map and the number. Location pages are organised by city or region, and some show a stylised map of how sites relate to one another, sometimes marked as not to scale. Capacity is given in megawatts and floor area in square metres, alongside counts of sites in operation and under construction. Founding years, listing dates and lists of markets often appear as a strip of figures on a home page.

The third is the technical and corporate layer. Interconnection pages describe, in plain terms, how customers can reach telecoms carriers and public clouds from inside a building, often called cloud on-ramps. Sustainability pages and annual environmental, social and governance reports set out the company’s stated targets, and investor pages carry results, filings and presentations. For a designer, these formats show how a business with few visible products builds an identity from places, figures and documents.

An international arm that became its own company.

Outside mainland China, GDS built an international business that now trades as DayOne. A DayOne press release of 1 January 2025 says the company, formerly operating as GDS International, was founded in 2022, is headquartered in Singapore, and launched as an independent group that day after closing its Series B funding; Mingtiandi reported in March 2026 that GDS rebranded the offshore business as DayOne in January 2025 and that William Huang chairs both companies. DayOne says its name stands for treating each day as a new opportunity.

GDS has since reduced its holding. In January 2026 it announced agreements for DayOne to buy back part of GDS’s shares, and its March 2026 results release said the deal had been completed, leaving GDS with a minority stake. In October 2026, The Straits Times reported, DayOne filed for a US share listing; that offering had not taken place at the time of writing. The same report listed DayOne’s data centres, running or in development, in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, Finland and Spain.

DayOne’s own timeline fills in the build-out. It says it bought land at Nongsa Digital Park in Batam, Indonesia, and at Nusajaya Tech Park in Johor, Malaysia, in 2021, set up its Singapore headquarters in 2022 and opened its first Southeast Asian data centre, at Nusajaya, in 2023. Its website describes a hub-and-spoke model it calls SIJORI, linking Singapore, Johor and the Riau Islands, and shows the three on a regional map marked “not to scale.” The 2025 release named SoftBank Vision Fund, Coatue Management and Baupost Group among its Series A and B backers, and the company says it entered Finland in 2025, with projects in Lahti and Kouvola.

At home, GDS has moved some buildings off its own books. Mingtiandi reported that in 2025 it sold a portfolio of data-centre companies into an asset-backed securities vehicle in the first quarter, and in the third quarter seeded a real-estate investment trust listed in Shanghai with a 29MW data centre near the city.

For a design guide, GDS shows how an operator can let dates, places and capacity carry its identity rather than imagery. Compare Chindata, another Chinese hyperscale operator, and ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, a Singapore-based platform. For this guide we use deep blue, teal and grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep GDS’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.