GF Fund has announced that it will impose purchase limits on its GF Vision Intelligent Selection Fund starting April 16, 2026. Managed by fund manager Tang Xiaobin, the product has secured the top performance spot among all market funds this year, largely driven by its strategic emphasis on the memory sector—the strongest performing segment within the semiconductor industry this year. Tang Xiaobin has also asserted that the global memory industry is experiencing a combination of "soaring demand and shrinking supply," indicating the potential for a "super cycle."
The high-performing fund has initiated purchase restrictions. According to the announcement, from April 16, the maximum daily subscription and conversion amount for a single fund account will be set at 10,000 yuan. The primary reason cited for the restriction is to "protect the interests of existing fund shareholders," a standard practice in the mutual fund industry to prevent large-scale inflows from diluting returns for current holders and to avoid operational challenges for the fund manager due to rapid asset growth.
Notably, the GF Vision Intelligent Selection Fund had a relatively small size previously. Data shows that as of the end of 2025, its assets under management were only approximately 300 million yuan, indicating limited market attention at that time. However, as the stock market progressed into 2026, the fund's performance surged amidst general market volatility. By April 2026, its year-to-date return reached 78%, ranking first among all market funds. This strong performance and high elasticity attracted significant investor interest, contributing to the decision to implement purchase restrictions. In recent years, several top-performing equity funds have experienced similar surges of short-term capital inflows following outstanding returns, prompting fund companies to restrict purchases to protect existing investors.
The fund's strong performance is primarily fueled by its focused allocation to the memory sector, enabling it to significantly outperform other semiconductor-themed funds. This year, sentiment in the memory industry has continued to rise, with expectations of substantial earnings growth attracting significant attention from market funds. According to periodic fund reports, various funds—including those focused on A-shares, Hong Kong stocks, and QDII products—have been actively exploring opportunities in the memory sector. Their holdings span companies from A-shares like Biwin Storage and Jiangbolong to South Korean giants SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, and even to U.S. emerging star SanDisk, which saw its stock rise nearly 2.7 times in the first four months of 2026, contributing significantly to the positive returns of QDII funds.
It is noteworthy that while risk appetite in the A-share market has fluctuated this year and valuation compression risks for tech stocks have increased—putting pressure on many tech-themed funds—funds with a core allocation to the memory sector have demonstrated resilient performance. This strength, even amid geopolitical tensions and broader tech sector adjustments, highlights the independent market dynamics of the memory segment.
Regarding the core logic behind the memory sector's strength, fund manager Tang Xiaobin provided an in-depth analysis in last year's fourth-quarter report. He believes that global AI investment is currently driven by a dual force of technological breakthroughs and industrial application demand, creating a cross-regional resonance. Major global cloud providers are collectively increasing capital expenditures, pushing the global AI industry from a "computing power arms race" toward a phase of value realization, which is expected to reshape the competitive landscape of the global tech industry.
The A-share tech sector is undergoing a structural transformation. The period from 2023 to 2025 represented a "big bang" for AI technology, characterized by hype and无序 competition, while 2026 may mark a "Darwinian moment" where natural selection prevails within the industry.
Tang explicitly judges that the global memory industry faces a golden combination of "surging demand and supply contraction," possessing the potential for a super cycle. The full-scale production and widespread application of NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform are seen as a critical turning point that will reshape industry competition.
Currently, enthusiasm for global AI investment remains high, with large-scale, high-growth AI investments continuously transmitting downstream, creating strong demand for core hardware. As the "data granary" for AI computing operations, memory chips have become one of the semiconductor sub-sectors with the most pronounced downstream pull. Since 2023, AI demand first drove a surge in requirements for chip categories like GPUs and HBM. As the scale of AI model training and inference continues to expand, the pull-effect on memory chips has become fully apparent—the global memory chip market has surpassed $150 billion, with AI emerging as the core engine driving market growth.
Tang Xiaobin stated that, under the dual opportunities of the global memory industry's upcycle and AI-driven industrial transformation, China's memory industry chain is leveraging the trend to accelerate comprehensive breakthroughs and rise. From upstream equipment and materials, to midstream chip design and manufacturing, and downstream module packaging and application, all segments of the entire industry chain are collaborating, embarking on a dual journey of import substitution and scale expansion.