SemiAnalysis maps 1,000 Chinese data centres: 24 GW delivered, a fifth of which is leased by ByteDance

The consultancy has published a building-by-building breakdown of China’s wind farm capacity – the second largest in the world after the US’s 56 GW – and notes that the lead time for a 100 MW site has fallen to twelve months.

SemiAnalysis published on 25 September 2026 its China Datacenter Model, a building-by-building census of more than 1,000 facilities operated by some 60 actors. The total exceeds 24 GW of capacity delivered by the end of 2026, placing China second in the world, behind the 56 GW in the United States.

The firm distinguishes between own-built parks, rented capacity and shared accommodation, and connects each site to its main tenants—a hyperscaler that can build its campus, rent from a colleague and rely in parallel on a co-location operator. In this cutting, ByteDance alone occupies about a fifth of the capacity delivered in China, and leases almost all of it rather than owns it.

Two figures illustrate the speed of the movement: the combined investment expenditures of Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu reached $20 billion in the second quarter of 2026, doubling over a year; and the standard delivery time for a 100 MW site has been reduced to a dozen months. The 24 GW count also excludes about 20 GW of dated projects and 30 GW of simple announcements.