Sixty-nine per cent from one customer

DayOne Data Centers, a Singapore company that builds data-centre campuses for the largest cloud and technology groups, filed on Monday to list American depositary shares on Nasdaq under the symbol DODC. Its registration statement on Form F-1 leaves the number of shares and the price range blank. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, Citigroup and BNP Paribas are the underwriters. The company filed confidentially in August for an offering that may raise as much as $5bn at a valuation of about $20bn, Bloomberg has reported, in a story carried by The Straits Times.

The growth is real. Revenue for the six months to June was $512.0m, against $151.5m a year earlier; for all of 2025 it was $484.3m, up from $178.1m in 2024. The net loss for the half was $77.2m. The loss for 2025, $367.1m, was mostly share-based compensation, which came to $341.8m that year. DayOne says it had 962MW of capacity in service on 20 September and about 2.3GW of what it calls Bookings, substantially all of which it expects to deliver by the end of 2028.

"DayOne is a leading digital infrastructure platform outside of the United States and China," the prospectus summary begins. The risk factors describe who pays for it. In 2025 and in the first half of 2026 its largest customer, which the filing describes as a global technology company with a short-form video platform, accounted for 69.4 per cent and 69.2 per cent of revenue. The second-largest supplied 12.3 per cent and 15.1 per cent. On our arithmetic, two customers produced 84.3 per cent of first-half revenue. The filing does not name either of them. Malaysia, home to DayOne's campuses in Johor across the strait from Singapore, produced 87.0 per cent of revenue in the half.

The filing links that concentration to geopolitics itself. "Moreover, the ongoing geopolitical tensions could potentially impact the business of our largest customer, a global technology company with a leading short-form video platform serving a worldwide audience," it says. DayOne adds that it does not believe the tensions would affect its existing contracts with that customer, but that they could affect future deployments. "If our largest customer were to become subject to any such restrictions, its growth prospects may be adversely affected, thereby resulting in reduced demand for our data center services."

Two more disclosures sit a few pages later. "For example, two of our existing customers have been added to the list of Chinese Military Companies maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense," the prospectus says. "In addition, our supply chain may from time to time include modular components that are manufactured by entities on the Entity List." It does not say which customers, or what share of revenue they account for, a gap the Business Times also noted. It also discloses that on 30 October 2025 several members of Congress wrote to the Commerce Department recommending that it investigate and restrict adversary products in AI infrastructure among other industries, in a letter that, by DayOne's account, described it as a China-linked company operating in the AI sector. DayOne says it is not aware of any action resulting from the letter.

DayOne was incorporated in the Cayman Islands in May 2022 as DigitalLand Holdings, a consolidated subsidiary of GDS Holdings, the Chinese data-centre operator listed in New York and Hong Kong. It was deconsolidated at the end of 2024 and took its current name on 1 January 2025. GDS still owns 19.4 per cent, behind Coatue and Hillhouse, which hold 19.5 per cent each, and ahead of Achi at 15.6 per cent, according to the shareholder table. GDS's chairman and chief executive, William Wei Huang, sits on DayOne's board. The filing notes that DayOne has no non-compete arrangement with GDS that would survive the offering, and that GDS could expand internationally and compete with it.

The prospectus addresses the outbound investment rule, the Treasury regulation that bars or requires notice of some American investments in Chinese companies working on chips, quantum and AI. "We do not believe we are a Covered Foreign Person under the Final Rule, because we do not engage in any Covered Activity (as defined in the Final Rule) or otherwise meet the definition of Covered Foreign Persons provided in the Final Rule," it says. It then notes that the rule is under review and that the COINS Act, now law, requires new regulations to replace it. "Changes to the publicly traded securities exception or other aspects of the Final Rule or the COINS Act could prohibit the purchase or trading of our ADSs by U.S. persons, impose new notification or other regulatory requirements, or make our ADSs less attractive to certain investors."

The money question is less dramatic but just as large. DayOne estimates the cost of completing its current Bookings at about $11.4bn beyond what it had spent by June. It paid $3.11bn for property, equipment, land use rights and construction deposits in the first half alone, about six times its revenue for the period on our arithmetic. At the end of June it had $1.98bn in cash, $1.4bn of short-term investments, $1.82bn of undrawn credit facilities and $4.35bn of long-term borrowings. "We believe that our currently available capital resources will be sufficient to fully fund our current Bookings," the filing says, adding that new Bookings will need more equity or debt.

DayOne is one of a group of data-centre companies preparing to list. Switch is seeking a valuation approaching $50bn including debt, and Nscale could raise as much as $3bn, according to the Bloomberg report. DayOne's own model is a few very large tenants, most of them on agreements of 10 to 15 years, and a build programme that only keeps growing if those tenants keep signing. Its largest tenant is a company it does not name, and its prospectus says that tenant could be hit by American trade restrictions. American investors are being asked to buy the shares on those terms.