In the short term, three signals have simultaneously ignited interest in this sector. On the overseas front, Nebius reported second-quarter revenue of $580 million, a staggering 454% year-over-year surge, with its AI cloud business boasting a 50% profit margin. Meanwhile, CoreWeave has accumulated a backlog of orders valued at $104 billion. Adding to this, Tencent has thrown its weight behind the trend, posting quarterly capital expenditures of 52.78 billion yuan—a 176% annual increase that shattered market expectations and set a new historical record. Tencent's president, Martin Lau, noted bluntly that computing equipment purchased just months ago can now be resold at a 30% premium—far from depreciating, computing power is appreciating in value. Furthermore, DeepSeek has announced substantial API price hikes, signaling the end of the "trade volume for price" strategy and opening up room for rental prices to climb.
Beyond these immediate catalysts, three structural shifts in the industry's logic are underway. First, there's token inflation: data from the National Data Administration reveals that China's daily token call volume has exploded from roughly 100 billion in early 2024 to 140 trillion by March 2026—a more than thousand-fold increase in just two years. Computing demand isn't growing linearly; it's expanding at an explosive rate. Second, supply-demand imbalance is becoming glaringly evident through pricing signals. The rental rate for Nvidia H100 GPUs has climbed from $1.70 per GPU-hour in October 2025 to $2.35 by March 2026, a nearly 40% jump. Domestically, channel prices for B300 servers have skyrocketed from 4 million yuan to 14.5 million yuan since the start of the year—a 260% surge. Third, there's a paradigm shift from "selling resources" to "selling tokens." Computing power leasing firms are rapidly transitioning their business models, moving away from time-based hardware rentals toward token-based pricing. These companies are evolving from mere "hardware landlords" into "intelligent computing operators."
As the computing power leasing industry experiences simultaneous growth in both volume and pricing, the AI midstream infrastructure layer—the sector's core—is poised to benefit significantly. This encompasses AI servers, data centers (IDC), network switches, and optical modules. The Cloud Computing ETF Huabao (159099) passively tracks the CSI Cloud Computing 50 Index, with computing power leasing comprising nearly 60% of its holdings, leading comparable indices like SHS Cloud Computing. Its top ten weighted stocks cover leaders across key segments, including optical modules (Zhongji Innolight, Eoptolink), servers/AI computing (Sugon, Inspur Electronic Information), data centers (Runsheng Technology), and software platforms (Kingsoft Office, Hundsun Technologies), offering investors a comprehensive way to capture the opportunities arising from AI computing expansion and cloud infrastructure prosperity. A MACD golden cross signal has formed, and these stocks are showing strong momentum!
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