During a recent internal strategy meeting, Baidu Intelligent Cloud executives set a new tone, raising their 2026 AI-related revenue growth target from 100% to 200%, mobilizing the entire workforce to strive for high growth and aggressively compete for the top spot in the AI cloud market. This is not an unfounded slogan. According to the latest IDC report, the global AI cloud market size is projected to exceed $400 billion by 2030. Statistics from Intelligent Hyperparameter show that throughout 2025, China's major cloud providers secured a cumulative total of 341 bids for large model-related projects, with a total contract value of approximately 2.7 billion yuan. In this intense competition, Baidu Intelligent Cloud won 109 projects, with a contract value of about 900 million yuan, securing the "double first" position in both the number of projects and contract value for two consecutive years.

It is learned that a Guotou Securities research report indicates that the demand for AI computing power continues to expand, with the optical module industry's prosperity maintaining an upward trend, bringing opportunities to all segments of the industrial chain. A China Securities Co., Ltd. research report suggests that Amazon's recent 15% price increase for its AI computing service—EC2 Machine Learning Capacity Blocks—marks a break from the long-standing convention of cloud service prices "only decreasing, never increasing," reflecting the tight supply of computing power. The latest data from Hugging Face, the world's largest AI open-source community, shows that Alibaba's Qwen open-source model downloads have surpassed 1 billion, making it the first open-source large model globally to achieve this milestone.

China Securities Co., Ltd. recommends focusing on cloud service providers, which may follow suit with price increases, while also continuing to recommend the AI computing power sector and AI applications. Recently, the performance of the computing power sector has been volatile. China Securities Co., Ltd. attributes this partly to lingering market divergence regarding demand outlook for 2027, and partly to heavy positioning in the sector. For instance, Zhongji Innolight and Sunwave Communication ranked first and third, respectively, as the top holdings of active funds. The world is currently in the midst of an AI industrial revolution, with implications as profound as the industrial revolution, necessitating observation from a longer-term perspective.

China Securities Co., Ltd. remains optimistic about the computing power demand and applications driven by AI, viewing short-term adjustments in the computing power sector as opportunities. Hong Kong-listed stocks related to the AI computing power sector include: Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable (06869), CIG (06166), FIT Hon Teng (06088), and TIME INTERCON (01729).