Singapore’s DayOne Heads for NASDAQ as Malaysia Drives 87% of Its Revenue

Singapore-headquartered DayOne Data Centers is taking a business built largely across the Causeway to Wall Street.

The data centre operator filed for a US initial public offering on October 5, opening its books publicly for the first time and revealing how central Malaysia, and Johor in particular, has become to its expansion. Malaysia generated 87% of DayOne’s revenue in the first half of 2026, while its two Johor campuses have secured about 1.4 GW of bookings and attracted five global hyperscalers.

DayOne plans to list American depositary shares on NASDAQ under the ticker DODC. The preliminary filing does not specify the number of shares, price range or size of the offering. Bloomberg reported in February that the company was aiming to raise about $5 Bn at a valuation of up to $20 Bn, figures that remain outside the formal terms disclosed in the prospectus.

Growth at a Cost

That distinction matters because the filing gives investors a much more detailed basis for judging any eventual valuation. Revenue reached $512 Mn in the six months ended June 30, up 238% from $151.5 Mn a year earlier.

Adjusted EBITDA rose more than fourfold to $205.9 Mn, while the adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 40.2% from 32.3%. Net loss, however, widened to $77.2 Mn from $12.6 Mn, driven partly by a one-time $62 Mn fee to end a historical customer support arrangement and $40.4 Mn of share-based compensation across SG&A (selling, general and administrative expenses) and cost of revenue.

The numbers show a company scaling quickly enough to generate stronger operating leverage, but doing so through an unusually capital-intensive build-out. DayOne spent or prepaid $3.11 Bn on property, equipment, land-use rights and construction-related deposits in the first half alone, compared with $2.29 Bn for the entire 2025. It also had $4.94 Bn of unconditional purchase commitments related to data centre development at the end of June.

Debt has accompanied that kind of investment. DayOne reported $4.9 Bn of outstanding debt, including borrowings and finance leases, as of June 30. The filing puts the cost of completing its current bookings at about $11.4 Bn beyond what it had spent by June 30, and says DayOne believes its available capital is sufficient to fund them.

The IPO would, therefore, give DayOne another source of capital as it converts a large contracted pipeline into operating capacity. The company has secured 4.6 GW of resources across 10 markets and about 2.3 GW of bookings, primarily from seven global hyperscale and technology customers.

At June-end, bookings stood at 1.79 GW, up from 763 MW a year earlier, while service capacity reached 675 MW at 98.7% utilisation. By September 20, capacity in service had risen to 962 MW and utilisation to 99.1%.

Built Across the Causeway

But the same scale that strengthens DayOne’s growth case also exposes two large concentrations. The first is geographic. Malaysia accounted for 85.8% of revenue in 2024, 81.5% in 2025 and 87% in the first six months of 2026.

DayOne delivered its first Johor campus at Nusajaya Tech Park in 2023 before expanding to Kempas Tech Park, both just across the border from Singapore. The company now has 10 customers in Johor and approximately 1.4 GW of bookings there, which Structure Research estimates gives it 44% of the market by bookings. When DayOne entered, Johor had only about 150 MW of hyperscale capacity.

That concentration also reveals the operating logic behind DayOne’s regional strategy. Instead of treating Singapore and Malaysia as separate data centre markets, it has built what it calls a SIJORI network spanning Singapore, Johor and Batam. The model uses Singapore as the connectivity and cloud anchor while pushing large-scale capacity into nearby markets where land and power are more readily available.

DayOne said its Singapore campus remains under development, while Johor has already become the network’s commercial engine. Its Batam campuses, at Nongsa Digital Park and Kabil Industrial Tech Park, are among the first large-scale AI sites in Indonesia, and it holds an estimated 66% of Batam bookings. Structure Research puts DayOne’s share of the wider SIJORI market at 33%.

Singapore’s own supply constraints helped create that opportunity. DayOne said the city-state has about 1.3 GW of data centre capacity in service, with a 99% utilisation rate, citing Structure Research, and expects limited incremental supply before 2028.

Singapore lifted a temporary pause on data centre growth in 2022 and, in July 2023, awarded about 80 MW of new capacity to four operators under a pilot scheme, including GDS, whose international arm later became DayOne. DayOne has since broken ground on a 20 MW facility in Singapore. Its first Johor site was developed partly to serve customers seeking Singapore-proximate capacity with low latency and greater room to scale.

Two Customers, 84% of Revenue

The second concentration is its customer base. DayOne’s largest customer, described in the filing as a global technology company operating a leading short-form video platform, generated 69.2% of revenue in the first half of 2026. Its second-largest customer accounted for another 15.1%.

Together, the top two generated 84.3% of revenue. DayOne warned that the limited universe of global hyperscale customers means any major reduction in demand could be difficult to replace. A significant majority of its customer agreements run for 10 to 15 years, although all allow early termination with specified costs and penalties.

Who Owns DayOne

The prospectus also clarifies who controls the company after its separation from Shanghai-based GDS Holdings. Coatue Management and Hillhouse each own 19.5%, while GDS retains 19.4% and Achi entities hold 15.6%. GDS had originally established the international business in Singapore before losing majority control at the end of 2024.

DayOne subsequently repurchased $385 Mn of shares from GDS in January 2026 as part of its ownership restructuring, and its Series C funding further diluted GDS’s stake. The company raised $1.9 Bn through Series A and B in 2024, followed by $1.3 Bn in Series C in 2025 and another $3.2 Bn in 2026.

The IPO proceeds are intended to develop and construct new data centre projects, as well as support working capital and general corporate purposes. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, Citigroup and BNP Paribas are underwriting the offering.

The Public Market Test

For public investors, however, the central question will go beyond whether demand for AI and cloud infrastructure continues to rise. DayOne has already shown it can turn Singapore’s capacity constraints into a much larger regional footprint and contract the resulting capacity quickly.

The harder test is whether a company spending billions ahead of revenue, carrying $4.9 Bn of debt and deriving more than four-fifths of sales from two customers can sustain that pace without weakening the economics that now underpin its IPO case.