The increase in computing power prices is moving from “scarcity” to “reporting”: domestic computing power is simultaneously released to redeem performance

1. Overnight US stocks: AI and semiconductors lead the way, computing power increases move from “scarce” to “reporting”

On September 17, EST, the three major US stock indices ended three consecutive declines. The NASDAQ closed up 1.69%, the S&P 500 rose 1.14%, the Dow rose 0.61%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose 3.14%. Nvidia rose 2.54%, AMD rose 6.36%, ARM rose 8.57%, and Intel rose 7.67%; Hwang In-hoon publicly stated that next year's chip sales are expected to double that of this year.

What is more noteworthy than the index is the systematic upward shift in the computing power rental price center. European computing power cloud manufacturer Nebius announced another price increase since October 1. GPU on-demand rent increased 17% to 21%, and the B300 had a cumulative increase of about 56%. This was the second round of price increases within three months. During the same period, CoreWeave signed a three-quarter short contract at a high price of about 40 million/mW, adding more than 25 billion US dollars in net customer commitments at the beginning of the quarter. A more structural change is the tightening of commercial terms — computing power purchases are shifting from a “one-year reservation” to a “three-year reservation”, and the prepayment ratio is rising to 30% to 40%. The three items of price, term, and advance payment are simultaneously skewed towards the supply side, and “supply is in short supply” of computing power has gone from a narrative to a measurable reporting figure.

Peripheral funding is also picking up. After the cumulative net sales of 148.3 trillion won in the first half of the year and the monthly sell-off reached a historical peak of 49.34 trillion won in June, net purchases of 400 million US dollars were achieved in August, the first correction after seven consecutive months. The main forces in this round of sell-off were Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the two major chip leaders. Foreign investment turned to the financial, energy, and automotive sectors during the same period, essentially a rebalancing of overvalued crowded chips rather than being bearish on AI. Continued sell-off has brought the valuation of Korean stocks to a record low of 6.2 times the KOSPI 200 forward-looking price-earnings ratio, and Morgan Stanley raised Korean stocks to “overallocation” based on this. The strong AI main line of US stocks and rising computing power resonates with the valuation base of risk assets in the Asia-Pacific region and the inflection point of capital return, and risk appetite in the global technology industry chain is being systematically repaired.

2. Panorama of the industrial chain: boom is transmitted upstream from chips, and domestic computing power is released simultaneously

Signals of rising US stock computing power prices are being transmitted to all links along the industrial chain, and the computing power assets of A-shares and Hong Kong stocks are active across the board.

Chip design is the starting point for resilience. Cambrian (688256.SH) rose 3.17% today to 1,141 yuan, up 25.56% from the beginning of the year; revenue for the first half of the year was 5.996 billion yuan, up 108.13% year on year, net profit to mother was 2,311 billion yuan, up 122.61% year on year, and gross margin reached 55.25%. The acceleration in the release of its performance confirmed the inflection point of domestic AI chips from “usable” to “large-scale commercial use” — Day0 level adaptation was achieved for mainstream models such as Shangtang, DeepSeek-4, and GLM5 in the first half of the year, and the simultaneous rise in prepaid accounts and inventory, pointing to active preparation of goods on the supply side for order delivery.

The optical module is the most deterministic part of the computing power chain's performance. Zhongji Xuchuang (300308.SZ) rose 0.57% today to 901 yuan, up 47.97% from the beginning of the year; net profit to mother for the first half of the year was 13.651 billion yuan, a sharp increase of 241.70% over the previous year. In the same period, Xinyisheng's net profit increased by 90.98%, and gross margin rose to 48.46%; Tianfu Communications gross margin was about 60%; Huagong Technology and Cambridge Technology continued to expand in 800G and 1.6T batch deliveries. The optical module boom is essentially a direct reflection of the capital expenditure expansion of overseas cloud vendors — the cloud business revenue growth rate of the three major North American cloud vendors rose to 31.6% to 81.8% year-on-year in the second quarter, and the median annual capital expenditure guidelines of the four leading cloud vendors reached US$73.25 billion.

Domestic GPUs are the direction with the greatest flexibility on the demand side. Tianshu Zhixin (09903) rose 7.09% intraday today to HK$134.40, up 178.84% year to date. What is behind this is the superposition of rising domestic model token consumption slope and accelerated core model adaptation: domestic GPUs have completed inference optimization for mainstream models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, compounding overseas supply constraints and a lag in the pace of domestic production capacity expansion, and the gap between supply and demand continues to expand.

Computing power operations are where the deterministic premium lies. Guangdong-Hong Kong Bay Intelligence (01396) rose 2.41% intraday today to HK$11.47 (as of press release), with a cumulative increase of 133.26% from the beginning of the year to date. Also facing a shortage of computing power, overseas Neocloud relied on “price increases” to cover the shortage to hourly rent; Guangdong-Hong Kong Bay Smart Computing relied on “long order locking” — as of mid-2026, orders for manual computing power technology services exceeded 37 billion yuan (already delivered, stable billing scale exceeded 20 billion yuan), and more than 95% of the new orders signed this year were three to five years long, cashing out the shortage as definitive cash flow. The hardware side earns boom beta, and the operation side earns a deterministic premium locked in a long-term contract.

As the boom spreads through the layers of chips, optical modules, GPUs, and operations, the strength of US stocks and computing power leasing essentially endorses the same thing — scarcity of computing power and pricing power, which has gone from narrative to report figures; what really needs to be repriced is the target of “performance delivery is now ahead of financial consensus” in every aspect.