Tuesday's early trading session saw CPU-related stocks mirror Monday's Wall Street rally almost point-for-point in the A-share market. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 2.26% to close at 27,122.09 points on Monday, marking its first record closing high in nearly four months. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index advanced 4.29%, with ARM jumping 17.16%, Intel rising 12.14%, and Qualcomm gaining 9.29%.
AMD surged 9.95% to $615.52, pushing its market capitalization above the $1 trillion threshold for the first time. Meta closed 11.43% higher overnight, driven by the launch of its new AI agent called Muse. In less than two weeks since its debut, the product has simultaneously topped the free download charts on both Apple's App Store and Google Play. Beyond the rankings, the shift in computing power architecture triggered by the proliferation of AI agents deserves closer attention.
The US market momentum carried directly into Tuesday's A-share opening. The Shanghai Composite Index opened 0.35% higher, the Shenzhen Component Index gained 0.94%, and the ChiNext Index rose 1.37%. CPU-related stocks opened sharply higher, with China Great Wall, Zongyi Stock, and Hesheng New Materials hitting the daily limit-up at the open. Loongson Technology, Hygon Information Technology, and National Chip Technology all opened with gains exceeding 5%.
Over the past two years, AI computing power attention has been almost entirely dominated by GPUs. Training requires stacking cards, inference requires stacking cards, and CPUs have long played a supporting role. AI agents have pushed this dynamic one step further. Instead of merely answering a single question, agents must execute a continuous sequence of tasks, including browser operations, API calls, sandbox execution, and tool orchestration, most of which fall on CPUs.
AMD's management has stated that the CPU-to-GPU ratio in AI infrastructure is gradually converging from 1:4 or 1:8 toward 1:1. In scenarios with dense AI agent deployment, the number of CPUs configured could even surpass GPUs. The number of CPU cores required per gigawatt of data center capacity has surged from approximately 30 million to 120 million.
The shift in demand has already been reflected in pricing and lead times. Intel has implemented multiple rounds of CPU price increases this year, with further hikes to select consumer and server CPUs announced in July. PC CPU prices are expected to rise approximately 10% more starting October 5. AMD followed suit in April, with average increases of roughly 10% to 15%. Intel has indicated that its production capacity can only fulfill about 50% of customer orders, while AMD projects server CPU revenue growth of more than 80% year-over-year in the second half.
Soochow Securities characterizes this transformation as simultaneous volume and price increases, advising investors to monitor whether Intel's fourth-quarter price hikes materialize and to assess the true intensity of CPU demand once agent applications scale up.
The domestic side of the market has absorbed this trend even faster. China Great Wall opened directly at the daily limit-up, trading at 16.32 yuan with sealing orders of approximately 2.04 billion yuan. The company is a core shareholder of Phytium Technologies, with a product lineup spanning chips, complete machines, and servers. Its fundamentals support the rally, with first-half net profit attributable to shareholders growing more than 125% year-over-year, core computing business revenue increasing over 31%, and AI server power supplies already achieving batch delivery.
Hygon Information Technology climbed to an intraday high of 269.74 yuan, with gains approaching 9.5% at one point, corresponding to a total market capitalization exceeding 600 billion yuan. Loongson Technology opened at 115 yuan and reached a high of 118 yuan. Montage Technology advanced 7.82% to 226.53 yuan. The company specializes in memory interface chips, serving as a direct supporting link in server platform upgrades. On the index front, the STAR 50 rose 2.25% and the ChiNext Index gained 1.53%, with semiconductor stocks as the primary driver.
The logic behind domestic CPUs differs somewhat from their overseas counterparts. The overseas narrative centers on industry prosperity, with price increases supported by quotation sheets and shortages evidenced by lead time data, benefiting companies like Intel and AMD that directly sell hardware. The domestic narrative leans more toward valuation recovery driven by self-reliance and import substitution. Domestic CPUs are not caught in Intel's capacity bottleneck, nor are they on the core procurement list for global AI server computing power, meaning sentiment plays a larger role in these gains.
A sector having a coherent narrative and making money on the day you buy are two entirely different matters. The stocks leading today's charge have largely priced in one layer of expectations already. Chasing them right now often coincides with peak emotion in the market. For those looking to participate, it may be worth waiting for the next divergence point, when the question to answer is whether these companies have real orders and actual production capacity.
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