SemiAnalysis Pegs China Datacenter Capacity at 24GW, US at 56GW

SemiAnalysis's new China Datacenter Model, reported by the Financial Times, puts delivered datacenter capacity in mainland China at over 24GW, against 56GW in the US as of the end of 2026, with roughly 20GW more in the pipeline and another 30GW in announced projects.

The firm tracks the buildout one site at a time, "1,000+ facilities across 60+ players", and uses a line that reorders the usual constraint debate: China's buildout is "chip-gated" with abundant generation, where "state utilities and local governments treat AI load as a growth win." Permitting before construction runs three to six months in China, against twelve to thirteen in the US; 100MW facilities routinely deliver in under a year.

One name dominates the demand side. SemiAnalysis finds that "ByteDance alone occupies roughly a fifth of delivered datacenter capacity in China and rents nearly all of it," making it the single most important customer for the country's wholesale colocation players.

The capex scales with the floor space. Combined spending by ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu went from roughly $35B in 2024 to over $50B in 2025 and is on a trajectory to $100B for 2026. Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu together posted $20B of capex in Q2 2026, more than doubling year on year, and, SemiAnalysis notes, "for the first time on record all three posted negative free cash flow."

The 24GW number sits inside a wider regional map in the same report: about 15GW in Asia-Pacific excluding China, about 14GW in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and about 2GW in Latin America. It lands against our running coverage of the AI infrastructure build-out, from Broadcom's $50B private-credit financing for OpenAI chips to the US bailout talks around Wolfspeed.