One customer paid for more than 80 percent of Chindata's revenue: ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin. Chindata built huge data centers on cheap land outside big Chinese cities, close to power and fiber. It leased whole buildings to a few large tech companies. In September 2020, people worked and watched video from home, and investors wanted anything that powered the cloud. Bain Capital, which controlled the company, took it public at the top of its range.

Built for a Few Giants

Jing Ju, Chindata's chief executive, founded its China data center business in 2015. The company began building its own hyperscale data centers in July 2016, many of them in Hebei and Shanxi provinces. The bet was size. Instead of renting racks to thousands of small clients, Chindata built whole campuses for a few giant ones. The group also ran Bridge Data Centres, with sites near Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai.

Bain Takes It Back

Chindata priced at $13.50 a share and began trading on the Nasdaq on September 30, 2020, under the ticker CD. It raised $540 million and closed its first day at $16.23. In 2023 China Merchants Group made a bid for the company. Bain Capital, which already held most of the votes, won with an offer of $8.60 per share. The deal took Chindata private for about $3.16 billion.

Cover: The Old Factory Site, Canton, John Thomson. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for long rows of buildings in China (server halls).