Core Viewpoint - The stock of GDS Holdings Limited (09698) has surged over 14%, currently trading at 38.2 HKD with a transaction volume of 327 million HKD, driven by news regarding Alibaba and Baidu's shift to internally designed chips for AI model training, reducing reliance on NVIDIA chips [1] Company Developments - Alibaba announced plans to issue approximately 3.2 billion USD in zero-coupon convertible senior notes, maturing on September 15, 2032, with about 80% of the proceeds aimed at enhancing cloud infrastructure, including data center expansion, technology upgrades, and service optimization [1] - Alibaba is the largest client of GDS Holdings, accounting for 33.5% of GDS's total committed area and 30.1% of net revenue in Q3 2024 [1] - GDS has established comprehensive partnerships with major cloud service providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, AWS, Azure, Baidu Cloud, Huawei Cloud, UCloud, and VMware's VCloud Datacenter [1] Industry Insights - According to Huatai Securities, key highlights for the company include a continuous increase in the on-shelf rate of domestic data center business and a rise in new signed orders [1] - The data center industry is currently experiencing a favorable supply-demand cycle [1] - GDS is actively launching new projects in Europe and Southeast Asia [1] - The company successfully issued the first batch of domestic data center REITs projects [1]