Company: GDHLF
Filing Date: 2025-04-28
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001410578-25-000935
Chunk: 170

Company: GDS Holdings Ltd
Filing Date: 2025-04-28
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 4
Chunk 170
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 conferences and workshops to raise awareness about the value of data center services. We also build our brand recognition by participating in industry and government workshops and industry standard-setting bodies, such as the China National Institute of Standardization Committee on Disaster Recovery for Information Systems.

Innovation, Technology and Intellectual Property

We employ a modular approach to developing, commissioning, equipping and fitting out our data center facilities. This approach allows us to cater to a range of customer requirements with regard to redundancy, power density, cooling, rack configuration and other technical specifications. The modular approach is an innovative construction technique designed to shorten the development timeline and lower costs, as advocated by leading industry participants. Additionally, we are adopting innovative pre-fabrication technology to further shorten the development period in order to meet the requirements for increasingly larger scale data centers. We were able to develop these innovative approaches as a result of having established and grown our own in-house data center design and construction project management capability, the experience gained through executing a hyperscale development program over multiple years, and by leveraging the know-how of certain of our international strategic partners.

We operate our data center facilities using a proprietary Data Center Operation Management Platform that was almost entirely developed in-house. It provides real-time monitoring of key operational metrics, allowing for greater efficiency of data center management processes. In addition, we have self-developed additional operational enhancement tools and technologies including robots, AI and smart buildings. This system was developed based on our proprietary know-how in customer service and the operation of data centers.

As of December 31, 2024, we had 224 registered computer software copyrights and 212 trademark registrations in mainland China, 39 trademark registrations outside mainland China and two pending trademark applications in mainland China, 68 pending trademark applications outside mainland China, including registered trademarks for “ 万国数据” “ GDS”
and, our figure trademark. As of December 31, 2024, we had 156 patents granted and 146 patent applications in mainland China, seven patent applications outside mainland China and had registered 17 domain names, including gds-services. com.

Table of Contents

We rely on a combination of copyright, trademark, trade secrets and other intellectual property laws, nondisclosure agreements and other measures to protect our intellectual property, such as our proprietary storage and management system, for which we have registered a copyright. We also promote protection through contractual prohibitions, such as requiring our employees to enter into confidentiality and non-compete agreements which are applicable to selected employees. We derive most our revenues in mainland China