Lyon: Still confident in global AI capital spending, prefer Lenovo Group (00992) and Zhongji Innox (300308.SZ)

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Lyon released a research report saying that Dario Amodei, CEO of the cutting-edge AI lab Anthropic, called for slowing down the pace of cutting-edge AI development, which was endorsed by OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and XAI, making the positions of competitors tend to be consistent. Meanwhile, the US government warned against slowing down the development of AI. The bank believes Amodei's remarks may be for potential commercial and political purposes, and does not anticipate reaching any binding rules on this issue. Since the rise in the first half of this year, the AI industry currently lacks a new narrative to further drive stock prices, and the bank is still confident in AI capital expenditure. The bank's top choices for global AI capital expenditure in the Chinese technology industry are Lenovo Group (00992) and Zhongji Innox (300308.SZ), with target prices of HK$48.7 and RMB 1,604 respectively.

The bank believes Amodei's remarks may have multiple purposes. First, increase competitor costs: As a competitor, if you shift engineering resources to compliance, you'll save time on next-generation models. Second, it sends a signal to the government: by demonstrating capabilities and voluntarily undergoing audits, the laboratory positions itself as the right party to lead and control AI, and is therefore worthy of support. Third, management expectations: Anthropic's growth has been slowing since mid-year, with an operating rate of around $65 billion disclosed in July, and the safety-led narrative provides investors with a reason to slow down.

The bank sees cutting-edge model development as a competition that is difficult for participants to quit because the capital expenditure investment cycle is inherently long. Furthermore, since it is difficult to monitor actual progress and all participants are natural competitors, it is not easy to turn this consensus into legally binding rules. The bank expects competition to continue.

The bank believes that the initiative may raise some concerns about AI capital expenditure in the short term, especially after stock prices rose in the first half of this year and in the absence of a new narrative. However, the bank is still confident in global AI capital spending. The bank's current preferred stocks in the global AI supply chain are Lenovo and Zhongji Xuchuang. Lenovo is a global AI server OEM, benefiting from a sharp rise in demand and improved profit margins for Neo Cloud customers. Zhongji Innotech should benefit from the development of optical communication technology, such as near-package optics (NPO), co-packaged optics (CPO), and 2.4T optical modules.