[Zheshang Internet | Xu Ziwei] AI Infra Research Special Topic 1: Tracing Profitability Gap Between Chinese and U.S. Cloud Providers, Welcoming New Opportunities Together in the AI Era

English summary

[發] Overall view: Bullish on the extension of cloud providers' industrial chain value and a significant narrowing of the profitability gap between Chinese and U.S. cloud providers. The report mainly # breaks down three major differences in profitability between Chinese and U.S. cloud providers: 1. Industrial chain value difference: North American cloud providers include the value of network transmission layer (self-built global backbone networks), while domestic cloud providers lease operator bandwidth services; this business has an OPM of around 15%. 2. Scale difference: North American cloud providers started earlier and are in the harvest period of economies of scale. 3. Business model difference: The U.S. has a high proportion of public cloud deployment and strong customer willingness to pay; the public cloud model is more conducive to improving capacity utilization, compressing marginal costs, and earning higher profit margins. Looking ahead to the GPU cloud era, we believe: 1. The value chain difference in the network transmission layer between Chinese and U.S. cloud providers still objectively exists, but overall, the expansion of industrial chain value has raised the profit margin ceiling (self-developed chips + IaaS + PaaS + MaaS + Agent); ...