Several storage chip concept stocks demonstrated strength during Wednesday's trading session.

Seagate Technology PLC (STX.US) and Western Digital Corp. (WDC.US) rose more than 2%, while Micron Technology, Inc. (MU.US) and SanDisk Corporation (SNDK.US) saw slight gains.

SK Hynix Inc. (SKHY.US) fell more than 5% at the open but had pared its loss to 2% by the time of writing.

A recent research report from a Bank of America analyst team, led by Vivek Arya, stated that the intensive rollout of major open-source AI models in China, exemplified by KimiK3 from Moonshot AI, has reinforced the institution's optimistic outlook for the storage sector and Micron Technology, Inc. (MU).

The "open-source" nature of these large models points to open weights, which does not circumvent the need for enterprises to procure storage hardware like HBM, DRAM, and NAND for deployment, indicating that the global AI wave will continue to drive long-term demand for memory chips.

The analysts noted that current API pricing for major domestic AI models is highly competitive, with offerings from Tencent's Hunyuan and KimiK3 priced significantly lower than overseas models like Anthropic's Claude.

However, they emphasized that this low pricing is a business model strategy and does not equate to a decline in hardware demand.

Despite ongoing optimizations in computational efficiency by various large models, the overall memory consumption has not decreased as model parameter counts and active parameter expansions continue.