Company: GDHLF
Filing Date: 2025-04-28
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001410578-25-000935
Chunk: 38

Company: GDS Holdings Ltd
Filing Date: 2025-04-28
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 3
Chunk 38
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 of existing or potential customers, harm to our reputation and increases in our security costs, which could have a material adverse effect on our operations, financial condition and results of operations.

Risks and deficiencies in cybersecurity and/or data security may also be identified in the course of government inspections, which could subject us to fines and other sanctions. During construction of certain of our facilities, government inspectors have cited security risks at our construction sites and subjected us and our legal representative to fines for such risks. We cannot assure you that similar fines and sanctions will not occur in the future, or that such fines and sanctions will not result in damage to our business and reputation, which could have a material and adverse effect on our results of operations.

In addition, any assertions of alleged breaches in cybersecurity or data security or IT systems failures made against us, whether true or not, could harm our reputation, cause us to incur substantial legal fees and have a material adverse effect on our business, reputation, financial condition and results of operations.

Table of Contents

Our ability to provide data center services depends on the major telecommunications carriers in China providing sufficient network services to our customers in the data center facilities that we operate on commercially acceptable terms.

Our ability to provide data center services depends on the major telecommunications carriers in mainland China, namely China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, providing sufficient network connectivity and capacity to enable our customers to transfer data to and from equipment that they locate in the data center facilities that we operate. Furthermore, given the limited competition among basic service providers in the telecommunications market in mainland China, we depend on the dominant carrier in each location to provide such services to our customers on commercially acceptable terms. Although we believe we have maintained good relationships with China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile in the past, there can be no assurance that they will continue to provide the network services that our customers require on commercially acceptable terms at each of the data centers where we operate, if at all. In addition, if China Telecom, China Unicom or China Mobile increases the price of their network services, it would have a negative impact on the overall cost-effectiveness of data center services in mainland China, which could cause our customers’ demand for our services to decline and would materially and adversely affect our business and results of operations.

Our leases for self-developed data centers or our agreements for third-party data centers could be terminated early and we may not be able to renew our existing leases and agreements on commercially acceptable terms or our rent or payment under the agreements could increase substantially in the future,