Company: GDHLF
Filing Date: 2025-05-27
Form Type: 424B5
Source: 0001104659-25-053058
Chunk: 26

Company: GDS Holdings Ltd
Filing Date: 2025-05-27
Form: 424B5
Chunk 26
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 to reduce investment risk and optimize resource planning. Once construction is complete, and the data center enters service, we re-categorize area pre-committed as area committed. We aim to maintain high commitment rates for each of our data centers.

For certain sites, we deliberately do not seek pre-commitments, in order to reserve sufficient capacity for our financial institution and large enterprise customers who typically procure with a shorter lead time once data centers are in service. This also helps to ensure that we have sufficient capacity available to fulfill the anticipated expansion requirements of strategic customers who we are already serving in the same location. As a result of this sales approach, some of our data centers under construction and in service have lower pre-commitment and commitment rates, respectively.

#### Delivery
Once construction is complete, and the data center enters service, we re-categorize area under construction as area in service.

Anchor customers with largescale commitments typically move in over a period of 6 to 24 months, whereas financial institutions and large enterprise customers typically move in over a period of 3 to 12 months. The longer move-in period for anchor customers is due to the larger scale of their deployments and operational models, under which they increase utilization of committed data center capacity in multiple phases and in line with the increasing load on their IT systems. During such move-in periods, customers have the right to use part or all of the services for which they have committed. They are billed for the amount of services they actually use, subject to a minimum billable amount as stated in the sales agreements. Such minimum billable amount typically steps up over time. Customers are usually not allowed to terminate their sales agreements before the end of the move-in period. See “Business Overview — Our Customers — Sales Agreements.” The portion of area committed by customers which is revenue generating is referred to as area utilized. As a result of the flexibility granted to customers to use part or all of the services during the move-in period, some of our data centers have lower utilization rates.

#### Commitment and Utilization Rates
Our business model provides us with high levels of revenue visibility due to the long-term nature of our customer agreements and substantial backlog. Backlog is defined as area committed or pre-committed by customers but yet to be utilized (total area committed minus area utilized at the end of each period). As of December 31, 2022, 2023, 2024 and March 31, 2025, we had backlog of 228,787 sqm, 213