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GDS Holdings heads into its November 13 earnings with an unusual split: short sellers have been quietly covering for weeks, yet the borrow market spent most of September fully exhausted.
The covering story is genuine. Short interest has fallen from roughly 13.3 million shares in mid-September to 11.7 million now, a drop of about 6.4% over the past month and nearly 1.5% on the week alone. At 5.9% of free float, the position is still meaningful but clearly retreating. What complicates the picture is the borrow market behind it. Availability was effectively zero for most of September and into early October, with utilization pinned at 100% on more than a dozen trading days. As of October 7, availability has recovered to around 29%, a sharp swing from the 3% reading just two days prior. That recovery likely reflects some short covering freeing up shares rather than new supply entering the lending pool. Cost to borrow has eased back to 1.5% from peaks near 2.2% in mid-September, a loosening consistent with the covering trend, though it remains well above where it was a year ago. The ORTEX short score of 71.5, down slightly from 72.6 a week ago, reflects a still-elevated bearish signal that has been slowly fading.
Options traders are not adding to the concern. The put/call ratio has actually drifted below its 20-day average, with the current reading of 0.57 sitting roughly 0.65 standard deviations beneath the norm. That is a mild call-side lean, and well within the range of the past year's 0.16 to 0.89 band. It is not a crowded hedging setup ahead of earnings.
The Street remains firmly constructive, with all 12 tracked analysts carrying buy-equivalent ratings. The most recent price target adjustment was a trim from TD Cowen to $36 in May 2026, but this followed a long run of upgrades through mid-2025 when JP Morgan moved to Overweight and RBC upgraded to Outperform with a $48 target. The bull case centres on GDS's C-REIT launch exceeding expectations at roughly 22x estimated 2026 EBITDA, well above prior assumptions, and the prospect of international operations generating more than $1 billion of EBITDA by 2028. The mean price target from analysts sits at $336, which is a data point that requires a caveat: this figure appears inconsistent with the stock's current price of $31.63 and likely reflects stale or mismatched data rather than current Street consensus. The individual targets from named analysts, $36 from TD Cowen and $46 to $50 from BofA, RBC and JP Morgan, are the more reliable anchors here and suggest a 20 to 60% implied upside from current levels depending on the analyst. Bears point to persistent weakness in Chinese tech demand, structural complications in the REIT market, and execution risk in the international build-out.
The ownership register adds texture. Singapore Technologies Telemedia holds a Schedule 13D activist stake, with its latest disclosed position at 28.7% of class, down from 34.2% previously, and this is worth flagging: an activist at the 13D level is one of the more significant structural facts about GDS's ownership. GIC Private Limited holds a further 7.6% on a passive 13G basis, last filed in August 2026. Among institutional investors, Canada Pension Plan holds 6.9%, and Barclays added more than 3.6 million shares in the most recent reported period. The Baupost Group and Carrhae Capital each added meaningfully to their positions in Q2 2026, with Baupost adding 725,000 shares and Carrhae adding more than 1.1 million. These are not trivial additions. On the insider side, the CEO and CFO each received share grants in early August, transaction type J rather than open-market purchases, so these reflect compensation awards rather than discretionary buying conviction.
GDS has one significant alt data signal worth noting. Wikipedia retail attention hit a z-score of 3.6 as of late September, well above its own 90-day history. This is an attention indicator, not a revenue signal, and no leading relationship between web traffic and GDS's reported figures has been established. It is colour rather than signal, but it suggests the stock is drawing more retail interest than usual ahead of the November print.
The last two earnings reactions have gone in opposite directions: a 2.4% one-day drop in August 2026 and a 5.1% one-day gain in the prior event. The one-week drift after both prints was modest, within 4% in either direction, suggesting the market tends to reassess quickly after the initial reaction rather than sustain momentum.
With 36 days to the November 13 print, the setup to watch is whether the short covering of recent weeks continues or reverses as the quarter closes, and whether availability remains in the 20 to 30% range or snaps back toward the near-zero readings that persisted for most of September.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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