Hong Kong Stock Concept Tracking | Investment in AI infrastructure has surged, and the two major memory chip giants are in a hurry, and the inventories of the two major memory chip giants are about to rise again? (with concept shares)
The Zhitong Finance App learned that recently, the South Korean brokerage firm KB Securities analyzed that as investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure expands at an unprecedented rate, the memory chip market is facing a serious supply shortage. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix's memory chip inventory is less than 10 days old, and the actual saleable supply next year may be significantly insufficient. It is worth mentioning that OpenAI released the strongest model GPT-6 Astra last week. Since Astra targets more complex AI tasks, the market is further betting that continuous iteration of cutting-edge models will drive growth in computing power demand and support core hardware requirements such as HBM, DRAM, and GPU.
What is driving this shortage forecast is the massive investment of the world's largest cloud computing companies in the field of artificial intelligence. And in this round of AI infrastructure investment, the importance of memory chips is rapidly rising. KB Securities expects AI-related investments from the world's leading cloud service providers to reach 1.3 trillion US dollars next year, an increase of 60% over the previous year. The report also indicates that the share of memory chips in AI infrastructure investment is expected to rise from 14% last year to 40% this year, and further to 57% next year.
The increase in the price of memory chips has brought huge cost increases to mobile phones. According to the latest global smartphone price trend tracking released by Counterpoint Research, since 2026, the retail price of smartphones sold worldwide has increased by an average of 15%, and the price increase of some models has nearly doubled. As the cost of storage and other components continues to rise, OEMs are continuously passing on higher costs to consumers. The price-sensitive market is facing higher pressure than the market where high-end models account for a relatively high level, and the price of newly released smartphones is also higher than that of previous generation products, which indicates that global smartphone prices are showing an overall upward trend.
Recently, the prices of various models from brands such as Huawei and Honor increased simultaneously, ranging from 200 yuan to 1,000 yuan. This is not the first time this year that the price of mobile phones has increased. Similar to the concentrated price increases for mobile phones in March and July of this year, the reason for this round of price increases is that memory prices continue to rise, and cost pressure has caused mobile phone manufacturers to adjust the prices of models currently on sale again. “Let's just wait and see the new models in September.” Some consumers said. The reporter observed that since this year, the price of mobile phones has gone up many times, causing consumers to switch phones less frequently, and the wait-and-see sentiment of mobile phone consumption is even stronger.
Notably, Korean media reported that Apple and Kioxia negotiated a 3 to 5-year NAND flash memory length contract, and that there may be no price cap, marking a shift in its procurement logic from “price pressure+multiple sources” to “lock quantity+long term contract.” Industry sources revealed that Apple may have recently signed a long-term supply agreement (LTA) for the supply of NAND flash memory. Currently, the counterparty, supply volume, and pricing terms have not been disclosed, but according to relevant market sources, the most likely supplier is the Japanese flash memory chip manufacturer Kioxia — it is originally one of the core suppliers of Apple NAND.
According to the analysis, supply-side structural changes will further amplify the supply-demand conflict. Memory chip manufacturers are slanting large production capacity to produce the next generation of high-bandwidth memory chips HBM4. This type of memory chip is specially used for AI large-scale model training. At the same storage capacity, the wafer production capacity required to produce HBM4 is about three times that of traditional DRAM. DRAM is mainly used as the operating memory of mobile phones and computers, and is the core chip for consumer general-purpose memory. In the context of limited total wafer production capacity, the expansion of production of the high-end memory chip HBM4 will squeeze the production capacity of ordinary memory chips, which will further increase the supply pressure on subsequent markets.
Related concept stocks:
SMIC (00981): SMIC (00981) announced its interim results up to 2026. The group achieved revenue of US$5.511 billion, up 23.7% year on year; profit attributable to the company's owners was US$677 million, up 111.1% year on year; basic earnings per share were US$0.08 million. According to the announcement, the increase in revenue was mainly due to increased wafer sales, rising average selling prices and changes in the product portfolio in the current period. The number of wafers sold (equivalent to 8-inch standard logic) increased by 14.9% from 4,682 thousand chips in the same period last year to 5,379 thousand wafers in the current period. The average sales price (revenue from sales of wafers divided by total number of wafers sold) was $966 for the current period, compared to $903 for the same period last year.
GigaYi Innovation (03986): The volume and price of the company's memory chip products have risen sharply, and the profit level has increased dramatically. In the first half of 2026, memory chips achieved revenue of 9.827 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 245.44%, gross profit margin of 67.57%, and niche DRAM and SLC NAND Flash growing rapidly year-on-year. MCU products benefit from demand in the industrial, consumer and automotive sectors, and the scale of shipments has grown relatively well. In terms of performance, the company achieved operating income of 11.566 billion yuan in the first half of 2026, up 178.67% year on year; net profit to mother was 6.857 billion yuan, up 1091.50% year on year.
Lanqi Technology (06809): As a leader in the memory interconnect chip market, Lanqi Technology is transforming from a memory interconnect leader to a platform-based interconnect chip company. In the context of the AI era, with its long-term focus in the field of high-speed interconnect chips, which are critical between computing power and storage, the company has formed a rich product matrix and occupied a leading position in the global market. PCle Retimer products have entered the release stage, and the company is expanding along the same origin path to the higher-value PCle Switch field, which is expected to open up new growth space. As AI shifts from model training to inference, especially the development of AI agents, the demand for server CPUs continues to rise, and the company is the main beneficiary of strong CPU demand.
Jiang Bolong (09976): According to the prospectus, Jiang Bolong is the world's leading independent brand semiconductor memory manufacturer. Based on the company's vertical integration capabilities covering main control chip and memory chip design, firmware development, system-level packaging and testing, Jiang Bolong designs, develops, manufactures and sells a complete storage product portfolio for end-side AI and traditional consumer, enterprise and industrial grade applications. According to Insight Consulting, in terms of revenue from storage products in 2025, Jiang Bolong is the second-largest independent semiconductor memory manufacturer among more than 100 global market participants and the largest independent memory manufacturer among more than 30 market participants in China. In 2025, Jiang Bolong occupied 1.2% of the global storage products market. Given the huge market size of the industry, this share is significant for independent memory companies.