Alibaba's Big Bet on AI, Multiple Brokerages Praise China's AI Computing Industry Chain
September 5th, as of 3:00 pm, the semiconductor sector was up by 3.41% to 1742.93 yuan per share. Among them, Tianyue Advanced rose by 20%, Baochi Storage rose by over 12%, Demingli rose by 10%, and Hanweiji rose by nearly 9%.
Recently, Alibaba released its second-quarter earnings report, showing that AI and cloud infrastructure capital expenditures reached 386 billion yuan, up 220% year-on-year and 57% compared to the same period last year. Over the past four quarters, Alibaba has invested over 100 billion yuan in AI, while reaffirming plans to invest 38 billion yuan in AI over the next three years. Additionally, Wind reports that Alibaba is developing a new artificial intelligence chip, which has entered the testing phase and will mainly be used for general AI inference tasks.
Mountain Securities believes that Alibaba's capital expenditures on cloud infrastructure are likely to stimulate investments in internet and operators' computing power, considering the expected improvement in domestic next-generation AI chip performance and capabilities, as well as the widespread adoption of mainstream large models in AI infrastructure. We believe that China's computing power investment ratio is likely to increase.
Regarding the reasons for domestic manufacturers' increased investments in the AI industry, Xiangcai Securities notes that the break-even point of AI big models and the increasing market share of AI-enabled devices such as smart glasses, AI phones, etc. have driven demand for high-performance Ethernet switches, advanced storage products, GPUs, and edge computing/endpoint power chips, among other semiconductor hardware.
On the policy front, the State Council recently issued a guideline for the "Artificial Intelligence+" action plan, recommending attention to computing power and endpoint chip industry chains. The State Council also issued an opinion on implementing the "Artificial Intelligence+" action plan, requiring the first achievement of AI integration with six key areas by 2027, with new-generation smart terminals and intelligent bodies achieving a penetration rate of over 70%. By 2030, the penetration rate will reach over 90%, and the intelligent economy will become an important growth pole for China's economic development. By 2035, China will have entered a new stage of intelligent economy and society.
On the supply side, East Securities recently released a research report stating that the overall price increase of semiconductors in August was larger than expected, with demand continuing to warm up. In September, demand may further recover. Global semiconductor sales reached 19.58% year-on-year in June, and cumulative year-to-date sales from January to June were 19.21%, reflecting a general recovery on the demand side.
On the foreign front, recently, NVIDIA announced that it will stop producing H20 chips. In Q2 2025, NVIDIA's Chinese region revenue was only $27.69 billion, down 24.49% year-on-year, mainly due to the lack of sales of H20 chips.
Meanwhile, domestic indigenous manufacturers have already provided equivalent or even better replacement products, with DeepSeek-V3.1 recently released and announcing UE8M0FP8 as the next-generation domestic chip design, which can reduce power consumption by half compared to FP16, and help improve computing efficiency and reduce deployment costs.
Editor in charge: Yang Dian