Zhongtai Securities: Domestic AI applications are expected to catch up faster and resonate with overseas

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Zhongtai Securities released a research report saying that compared to previous major leaps in information technology, the AI industry is still in the early to middle stages of development. “Performance improvement+cost reduction” continues to unlock more implementation scenarios, and enterprise clients are also beginning to actually increase their investment and use of AI. At the same time, with the “15th Five-Year Plan” as the guide, China's AI application industry will also usher in a good policy and market dividend period. Domestic AI applications are expected to quickly catch up with overseas AI application industries, thus achieving a wave of resonance in AI applications at home and abroad.

The main views of Zhongtai Securities are as follows:

Global computing power supports continued growth, and AI applications from leading manufacturers are beginning to see a closed loop of business logic.

1) The four largest CSP vendors in North America accelerated capital expenditure. By the time of CY25Q2, the four major vendors had capex of 10 billion dollars in a single quarter. Domestic Ali and Tencent are also rapidly increasing capital expenditure investments.

2) Leading overseas AI application vendors have initially achieved better commercialization of AI applications. For example, OpenAI expects revenue to more than triple to reach 12.7 billion US dollars in 2025, and its revenue in 2024 is 3.7 billion US dollars; domestic Tencent and Ali also used detailed performance and business data in this year's performance reports, which confirm that current AI has truly enabled business transformation.

The domestic computing power industry continues to advance as AI sovereignty superimposes autonomous, controllable technology and strong catalysis.

As AI sovereignty develops into a trend, and Trump once again provoked global trade disputes and technological confrontation this year, the urgency of localizing computing power and being autonomous and controllable has further strengthened. Governments at all levels have intensively introduced a number of policies, opinions and regulations to support the construction of domestic computing power, and domestic entities represented by operators and universities have also stepped up their efforts to recruit and use domestic computing power.

At the same time, along with the rapid development and continuous breakthroughs in China's semiconductor industry, the performance of domestic chips has improved rapidly, and technologies such as supernodes have also helped improve the ability of domestic computing power by “supplementing quality with quantity”. In the long run, the long-term trend of the AI industry remains unchanged, and demand for computing power continues to boom. The domestic computing power industry still has great opportunities to achieve higher quality development in the future.

AI applications already have the conditions to be implemented on a large scale, and domestic AI applications are expected to catch up faster and resonate with overseas.

Similar to previous major leaps in information technology, the AI industry is still in the early and middle stages of development. “Performance improvement+cost reduction” continues to unlock more implementation scenarios, and enterprise clients are also beginning to actually increase their investment and use of AI. At the same time, with the “15th Five-Year Plan” as the guide, China's AI application industry will also usher in a good policy and market dividend period. Domestic AI applications are expected to quickly catch up with overseas AI application industries, thus achieving a wave of resonance in AI applications at home and abroad.

Risk warning: The risk of international political and economic changes. AI's falling short of expectations poses a risk that downstream computing power demand will fall short of expectations. The risk that the supply of computing power will be rapidly mitigated by scarce supply. The risk of increased competition in the market. There is a risk that publicly available materials used in research reports will be delayed or not updated in a timely manner.