Bringing in a former Geely veteran, the "king of Hong Kong shell companies" has changed his playbook.

This year, an interesting shift is unfolding in the real estate industry. Some companies are beginning to seek out a new type of land: computing power land that can support the artificial intelligence era.

Hong Kong-listed company Techoy Property (00199.HK) is one of them.

On July 21, Techoy Property announced that it had signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with Rudong County, Jiangsu Province, planning to participate in the development of the Xiaoyangkou Green AI Computing Center in Rudong, Nantong.

The project covers a planned area of over 16,500 mu, backed by energy resources including offshore wind power, photovoltaic power, LNG, and geothermal heat at 108℃.

If in the past real estate era, the core indicators of land were location, floor area ratio, and selling price, then in the AI era, land is embracing a new valuation logic.

The most expensive land in the future may not necessarily be the one closest to the CBD. Global tech companies have extended their AI competition from models to energy, and from chips to land.

The OpenAI-led Stargate project is planned to reach the 10GW scale; Meta is deploying 5GW-level AI data centers; CoreWeave is also building GW-scale AI infrastructure.

Models can be replicated, algorithms can be iterated, but power, server rooms, chips, and data centers require real-world investment. The AI competition, seemingly a battle of models, is fundamentally an infrastructure war.

What Techoy is betting on is exactly the infrastructure opportunity in this industrial migration.

Interestingly, a year ago, Techoy was still a typical real estate company.

Over the past year, it has sold almost all of its traditional real estate assets: Hong Kong properties, Canadian hotels, UK projects, equity in Beijing hotels... the total value of sold assets is about 1.7 billion Hong Kong dollars, many of which were sold at a loss.

If adapted into a movie, this company should have reached its grand finale. But Techoy suddenly staged a plot twist: it turned around and started doing AI.

It first invested in the UK AI computing platform Nscale, then partnered with China Unicom (Hong Kong) to secure AI data center resources, introduced the core team of Chayora Data Centers, and secured its first AI computing power service order.

A week ago (July 15), it played another key card: He Xuechu.

This veteran, who was present at the key capitalization node of Geely Auto, officially took office as executive director and co-chairman of Techoy Property.

A company that sells off old assets, enters a new industry, and then brings in a figure familiar with industrial capitalization no longer looks like a simple transformation, but more like a re-bet on a listed platform.

When talking about Techoy, one name cannot be avoided.

Chen Guoqiang, the controlling shareholder of Techoy. He is nicknamed "Shell King" in the Hong Kong capital market. In 2011, he led a consortium to acquire equity in TVB, ushering the Hong Kong TV industry from the Run Run Shaw era into a new capital era.

Behind that transaction was a capitalization turning point for the Hong Kong media industry. That deal made many people realize for the first time that TV stations are not just content companies, but also a type of capital asset.

Chen Guoqiang's greatest strength is that when an industry's story is drawing to a close, he looks for the entrance to the next era. While others study industry cycles, he studies era transitions.

This is why Techoy's introduction of He Xuechu has drawn market attention.

The name He Xuechu is no stranger in the history of China's auto industry capitalization. From 2002 to 2005, He Xuechu served as executive director and chairman of Geely Auto. Back then, Geely was not the global automotive group it is today. Li Shufu faced challenges that went far beyond just car manufacturing.

More importantly, he needed to convince the capital market that a privately-owned Chinese automaker could grow into a genuine industrial company. Later, He Xuechu took the helm of Hongqiao Group, leading the company to shift from resource businesses to the new energy industry chain, and gradually integrate into the Geely ecosystem.

Automobiles, mining, and new energy seem completely unrelated. But their underlying logic is the same: put tomorrow's industry into yesterday's listed platform.

The most valuable people in the capital market are not necessarily technical experts, but those who understand how to guide an industry from zero to full capitalization.

He Xuechu has exactly gone through such a process. He was there when Geely needed capitalization. He was there when Hongqiao needed to transform into new energy. Now that Techoy is preparing to integrate its real estate platform into the AI industry, he has appeared again.

Once is a coincidence, twice can be called capability, and the third time will make the market re-examine this methodology.

Of course, the AI track has never lacked stories.

In the past two years, a large number of companies have announced their embrace of AI: some released models, some established research institutes, and some stuffed their PPTs full of GPUs.

The capital market will eventually ask a question: Can your AI business actually make money?

Techoy is trying to answer this. This May, the company secured its first AI computing power technical service contract, worth about 28.9 million RMB. Subsequent announcements show that the order has been fully delivered, the customer has completed acceptance, and it has been in formal operation for over a month.

This means that Techoy is not just telling stories at the conceptual level, but has begun to enter a real business closed loop.

For a company that has crossed over from real estate to AI, the significance of the first order goes far beyond revenue. More importantly, it proves that the team has the basic capabilities to enter this industry.

If the computing power service order is a test of the waters, then the Green AI Computing Center is a long-term bet.

Of course, succeeding in the AI industry cannot be achieved simply by changing a name. A real estate company buying a piece of computing power land will not automatically turn into NVIDIA.

No one knows right now whether Chen Guoqiang will successfully bet on the next era again. But the capital market will always pay attention to people like this: they may not succeed every time, but they always find the next story right before the old one comes to an end.

This article is from the WeChat public account “Lushu”, written by Hardworking Lushu, published with authorization from 36Kr.