GDS Holdings, which builds and rents colocation space — power, racks and cooling — to Chinese cloud and internet firms, used its 13 August earnings call to report the strongest half-year of sales in its history: 260 megawatts of new bookings in the second quarter, 470 in the first half, and a full-year target lifted to a gigawatt from 500 megawatts. Backlog rose from 450 megawatts in January to 757 at midyear. The shares slid anyway, on tighter margins.

A week earlier, SharonAI — founded in 2024, 25 employees, a high-performance-computing and GPU-cloud operator that mostly rents space in other people's buildings — disclosed a six-year, $4.9bn collaboration with Nvidia covering 40,000 GB300 chips and 72 megawatts. Its quarterly revenue was $1.93m. The stock rose 54% in five sessions.

That contrast is the whole of the month's move in this group. Across the six names, the sum of one-month returns comes to 31.7 percentage points, and SharonAI and WhiteFiber supply 31.0 of them. Keel Infrastructure fell 10.8%; VNET fell 1.6%. Stretch the window to three months and four of the six are down double digits, for a group average of -6.2%.

The charts agree with the businesses less than they appear to. Five of the six moved into weaker trends over the past 90 days, and every transition was downward. GDS and VNET have both had their 50-day averages below their 200-day since late June.

What the operators reported

GDS grew first-quarter revenue 23.6% to about $470m and expanded gross margin to 33.6% from 23.7% a year earlier. The catch is forward pricing: management guided monthly recurring revenue per megawatt down roughly 3% by the fourth quarter against a year earlier, as legacy contracts reprice and new markets dilute the mix, and raised capital spending to about $1.4bn. Net leverage is 4.7x. It trades at 14.2x trailing EV/EBITDA and 1.45x book, the cheapest anchor in the set — falling on record demand.

VNET, which runs 78,540 cabinets across 40 self-built Chinese data centers, shows the cost side more plainly. First-quarter revenue grew 19.8% to about $375m, but gross profit grew 8.9% and gross margin fell to 22.9% from 25.2%. Free cash flow is deeply negative, a trailing yield of -41.5%, the worst here.

Applied Digital, a former crypto miner that now hosts AI computing in North Dakota, is the extreme version. Full-year revenue rose 183.7% to $611.3m, and its 10-K carries a $36.2bn lease backlog after roughly $20bn of new 15-year hyperscaler contracts were signed in the quarter. Yet fourth-quarter gross margin collapsed to 15.7% from 42.5% the quarter before, as revenue doubled and new capacity started depreciating. At 48.8x forward gross profit it is more than double DigitalOcean. Its anchor tenant, CoreWeave, now carries $35.6bn of debt.

Keel, which develops data centers and power infrastructure in North America, is the one name whose decline the numbers support. Second-quarter revenue fell 60.9% to $30.4m, gross margin was deeply negative, and it has still signed no high-performance-computing lease. Its forward price-to-sales of 18.8x sits above its trailing 13.9x — the multiple gets dearer because consensus has revenue falling 59% this year.

WhiteFiber, spun out of Bit Digital last year to run GPU-optimized halls and rent GPU capacity by the hour, is the closest thing here to a supported advance. Revenue rose 54% to $28.8m, colocation revenue nearly tripled, and it is the only member whose forward gross-profit multiple, 14.5x, undercuts DigitalOcean's 22.6x. But $12.3m of the quarter's cloud revenue came from a customer termination, gross margin slipped to about 59% from 61%, and permanent financing for its North Carolina site is not yet closed against $56.1m of cash.

The margin tax is the common thread

DigitalOcean, which sells the same compute by the virtual machine to developers, grew revenue 28.6% last quarter while gross profit grew 18.1% and gross margin fell to 55.0% from 59.9%. That is the pattern repeating at VNET, at WhiteFiber, and inside a single Applied Digital quarter. Signed megawatts are being converted into depreciation faster than into gross profit. Nvidia's July backstop, under which it rents back unused GPU capacity at a fixed rate, addresses the lenders' problem, not the margin one.

The setup

Where it stands — The month's gain belongs to two contract announcements; the operators reporting record bookings are in downtrends. Would confirm — GDS holding gross margin above 30% while backlog converts toward its gigawatt booking target. Would invalidate — Applied Digital's gross margin recovering toward 40% in the September quarter as new halls bill. Watch next — SharonAI's fourth-quarter revenue ramp, the first material revenue management has promised. Valuation — GDS 14.2x trailing EV/EBITDA, 1.45x book; Applied Digital 48.8x forward gross profit against DigitalOcean's 22.6x.