Jinwu Financial News | CITIC SEC stated that the current computing power centers can be divided into IDC and AIDC, with AIDC providing the main increment to the computing power market. Artificial intelligence requires massive computation, with the needed computational capacity growing exponentially. For the leading models in computation volume, the amount of computation required to train compute-intensive models increases steadily by about 5 times each year. From a global market perspective, according to McKinsey's forecast, the demand for power capacity in data centers is growing at an annual rate of 19% to 27%. To avoid shortages, it is essential to build at least twice the data center power capacity constructed since 2000 in less than a quarter of the time between 2024 and 2030. In the U.S. market, companies continue to increase capital expenditures, with major technology companies' overall capital expenditure plans for 2025 rising by 28.65% compared to 2024. Although the construction level of cabinets in the U.S. has set records for consecutive years, the co-location vacancy rate in North America will still fall to a historic low of 2.6% by the end of 2024, with the average monthly revenue per cabinet gradually increasing and rental prices continuing to rise.
The domestic data center industry started relatively late compared to the global market, lagging by about 1-3 years. However, with DeepSeek reshaping the ecosystem of open-source large models, AI applications are expected to experience explosive growth, maintaining a high growth rate in capital expenditures for computing power across various manufacturers. In terms of industry structure changes, AI application scenarios are gradually becoming vertical and application-oriented, with inference expected to become mainstream in the future and gradually occupy a larger share, while the usage rate in hub node regions will significantly exceed the national average. On the supply side, companies benefiting from interest rate advantages and regional node advantages are expected to gain more.
The institution indicated that China's computing power market is in its nascent stage. Although there may be a certain degree of "short-term computing power surplus" in the current market, compared to global and U.S. markets, domestic capital expenditures related to computing power and the number of computing power data centers are still relatively low, with "long-term shortage" serving as the main logic of the industry. In the long run, construction companies with the funding advantages brought by state-owned capital, along with comprehensive strengths such as green power, construction, and leasing, will maintain their core competitiveness in this wave of AIDC.
