Overnight on September 17, U.S. stocks snapped a three-day losing streak, with the Nasdaq climbing 1.69%, the S&P 500 up 1.14%, and the Dow gaining 0.61%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index jumped 3.14%, driven by strong performances from key players. NVIDIA rose 2.54%, AMD surged 6.36%, ARM gained 8.57%, and Intel added 7.67%. Jensen Huang publicly stated that he expects chip sales next year to double this year's figures.

More notable than the index movements is the systematic rise in the pricing benchmark for computing power rentals. European cloud provider Nebius announced another price increase effective October 1st, with on-demand GPU rental fees rising 17% to 21%. Its B300 series has now accumulated approximately 56% in gains this year, marking the second price hike in three months. Meanwhile, CoreWeave secured a high-priced short-term contract worth approximately $40 million per megawatt for Q3, adding over $25 billion in new client net commitments at the start of the quarter. A more structural shift is underway in contract terms—computing power procurement is moving from one-year reservations to three-year commitments, with prepayment ratios climbing to 30%–40%.

Prices, contract durations, and prepayments are all tilting in favor of suppliers, transforming the "supply shortage" narrative into measurable financial metrics. External capital flows are also improving. After cumulative net selling of 148.3 trillion Korean won in the first half and a record monthly sell-off of 49.34 trillion won in June, foreign investors returned with net purchases of $400 million in August—the first positive month after seven consecutive months of outflows. The selling was primarily concentrated in chip giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, while foreign capital rotated into financials, energy, and automotive sectors, reflecting a rebalancing of crowded high-valuation positions rather than a bearish view on AI.

This sustained selling has compressed Korean equity valuations to historically low levels, with the KOSPI 200 forward P/E ratio at 6.2 times. Morgan Stanley subsequently upgraded Korean stocks to "overweight." The strength of the U.S. AI rally, coupled with rising computing power prices, attractive valuations in Asia-Pacific risk assets, and the inflection point for capital inflows, suggests a systematic repair of risk appetite across the global tech supply chain.

Where the momentum starts

The signals from U.S. computing power price increases are transmitting along the supply chain, activating computing power assets across A-shares and Hong Kong-listed stocks. Chip design leads the rally. Cambricon Technologies (688256.SH) rose 3.17% intraday to 1,141 yuan, up 25.56% year-to-date. Its first-half revenue reached 5.996 billion yuan, up 108.13% year-over-year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 2.311 billion yuan, up 122.61%, and gross margins at 55.25%. The accelerating earnings delivery confirms the inflection point for domestic AI chips transitioning from "usable" to "large-scale commercial deployment."

In the first half, the company achieved Day-0 level adaptation for mainstream models including SenseTime, DeepSeek-V4, and GLM5. The simultaneous rise in prepayments and inventory indicates proactive preparation for order fulfillment. Optical modules represent the segment with the strongest earnings certainty in the computing power chain. Zhongji Innolight (300308.SZ) gained 0.57% intraday to 901 yuan, up 47.97% year-to-date. Its first-half net profit attributable to shareholders reached 13.651 billion yuan, a massive 241.70% increase. Eoptolink in the same segment saw net profit grow 90.98% with gross margins rising to 48.46%.

TFC Communication maintains gross margins around 60%, while HGTech and CIG continue to scale up volume deliveries in 800G and 1.6T products. The optical module boom is essentially a direct reflection of overseas cloud providers' capital expenditure expansion. North America's top three cloud companies saw their Q2 cloud business revenue growth accelerate to between 31.6% and 81.8%, with guidance for full-year capital expenditure from the four leading cloud providers averaging $732.5 billion.

Where the demand elasticity lies

Domestic GPUs offer the greatest demand-side elasticity. Iluvatar CoreX (09903) rose 7.09% intraday to HK$134.40, up 178.84% year-to-date. This surge reflects the combination of rising token consumption slopes for domestic models and accelerated chip-model adaptation. Domestic GPUs have completed inference optimization for mainstream models like DeepSeek and Qwen. Combined with overseas supply constraints and lagging domestic capacity expansion, the supply-demand gap continues to widen.

Where certainty premium resides

Computing power operations offer the certainty premium. GBA AI COMP (01396) climbed 2.41% intraday to HK$11.47, up 133.26% year-to-date. While overseas neocloud providers rely on price hikes to convert scarcity into hourly rental revenue, GBA AI COMP leverages long-term contract lock-ins. As of mid-2026, its indicative orders for computing power technology services exceed 37 billion yuan, with delivered and stable billing scale surpassing 20 billion yuan. More than 95% of new contracts signed this year are three-to-five-year agreements, converting scarcity into predictable cash flows.

Hardware segments capture cyclical beta, while operations segments earn the premium from long-term contract certainty. As momentum cascades through chips, optical modules, GPUs, and operations, the strength in U.S. stocks and computing power leasing validates the same underlying story—computing power scarcity and pricing power have transitioned from narrative to reported financials. The real repricing opportunity lies in identifying assets where earnings delivery has already surpassed market consensus.