阿里云进化论(1):行业层面为何看好明年应用爆发?

Investment Rating - The industry investment rating is "Positive" and maintained [6] Core Insights - The report highlights a two-year lag in the domestic AI capital expenditure (Capex) cycle compared to overseas trends, with a significant increase expected in 2024 [3][4] - Domestic leading cloud providers, such as Alibaba Cloud, are anticipated to see revenue growth starting from the second half of 2024, reflecting the returns on AI investments [4][35] - The report predicts a substantial increase in token consumption in the domestic market by 2026, aligning with the overseas growth patterns [5][40] Summary by Sections Overseas Observation - The overseas AI industry has a three-stage cycle from Capex investment in 2023, revenue growth for cloud vendors in 2024, to token explosion in 2025 [3][11] - High Capex investments are primarily directed towards model training, which is costly and resource-intensive [19][22] Domestic Observation - Domestic major players are expected to officially start their AI Capex cycle in the second half of 2024, with a one-year delay compared to overseas counterparts [4][31] - Revenue growth for leading domestic cloud providers like Alibaba Cloud is projected to rebound from a low of 3% to 26% year-on-year by late 2024 [4][35] Domestic Forecast - The report anticipates that the domestic token explosion will occur in 2026, with current token consumption not showing significant growth compared to overseas trends [5][40] - As coding and multimodal models mature, downstream application scenarios are expected to open up, leading to increased demand for high-quality tokens [5][40]