In this paper, the asymptotic sum rate of a multi-user distributed antenna system (DAS) is analyzed. To mitigate inter-user interference, minimum mean squared error (MMSE) receivers are utilized to cooperatively process received signals in the uplink. It shows that inter-user interference is efficiently mitigated and the uplink sum rate of a multi-user DAS is greatly improved by adopting MMSE receivers. For very large number of users and remote antennas, the asymptotic uplink sum rate of MMSE receivers is derived by using virtue of the random matrix theory, which can be simply calculated in an iterative way. The approximation is verified to be quite accurate by Monte Carlo simulations.