The recent volatility in global capital markets has raised questions: is this a short-term sentiment swing or a shift in long-term fundamentals? On July 21st, an exclusive dialogue with Kong Rong, Deputy General Manager of GLMS Securities Research Institute and Chief Overseas Analyst, cut through the noise, offering investors clarity on key technology sector opportunities for the second half of the year.

In the discussion, Kong Rong provided a systematic review of the market trends in the first half. She pointed out that the sharp rally in global technology stocks, from A-shares to U.S. stocks, and across semiconductors, optical storage, and chip design, has seen outstanding performance across the entire hardware and AI industry chain. The initiation of this rally was not based solely on technological speculation but stemmed from a critical inflection point—AI has begun to genuinely generate revenue.

Taking the leading overseas model company Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META) as an example, its annualized revenue surged from approximately $9 billion at the beginning of last year to surpassing a monthly run-rate of $10 billion by the first quarter of this year. This "step-change" in the revenue curve has significantly boosted market confidence. Following sustained capital expenditure, investors are finally seeing the dawn of cash flow and commercial viability.

"AI is now truly demonstrating a profit-making effect," Kong Rong emphasized during the exchange. This development is not only prompting cloud service providers to increase their capital expenditure but is also driving up prices for upstream hardware—because genuine demand has materialized, moving beyond mere conceptual hype.