Supercycle？ Just now, this plate broke out across the board!
After the U.S. chip stocks rose overnight, during the Asian trading hours on October 2, Hong Kong stocks and Korean chip stocks also rose collectively. SK Hynix once rose by over 12%, and Hong Kong stock SMIC rose by over 8%.
In the news, the global memory chip market ushered in a new round of soaring prices, which was driven by the imbalance between supply and demand, technical iteration and geopolitics. The domestic and international markets reacted strongly, and institutions were generally optimistic about the industry’s prosperity in the next two years.
Chip stocks rose collectively.
On October 2, Hong Kong stocks opened higher and higher, and the semiconductor sector performed strongly. As of press time, the Wind Hong Kong Semiconductor Index rose more than 6%, and once rose more than 7% in intraday trading.
In terms of individual stocks, SMIC rose more than 8%, while Hua Hong Semiconductor rose more than 4%, with both share prices hitting new highs.
South Korean semiconductor stocks also performed strongly. SK Hynix rose more than 12% in intraday trading, Hanmei Semiconductor once rose nearly 8%, and Samsung Electronics rose nearly 5%.
In addition, U.S. chip stocks generally rose overnight, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose by 2.05%, once again hitting a record high. Micron technology rose by more than 8%, Intel by more than 7%, applied materials and ARM by more than 6%, Ketian Semiconductor by more than 4%, and ASML and TSMC by more than 3%.
In the news, on October 1st, local time, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) research company, announced the establishment of a cooperative relationship with South Korean chip giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to provide chips and other solutions for the Stargate project.
In January this year, US President Trump announced a joint investment plan called "Stargate". The main investors are OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle Bone Inscriptions. The "Stargate" project plans to invest 100 billion US dollars to build an AI computing server, and the investment amount will be expanded to 500 billion US dollars within four years.
Expanding the supply of chips is one of the core goals of the project. NVIDIA said last week that it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and provide it with data center chips.
According to the statement of Samsung and SK Hynix, both parties promised to speed up the production of advanced chips to meet the growing storage demand of OpenAI in the Stargate project.
Earlier, OpenAI said last week that it would build five new data centers in the United States with Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Softbank in the future, including two in Texas and one in New Mexico, Ohio and the midwest with undisclosed location.
The memory chip enters a new cycle.
According to the analysis, with the substantial increase of investment in artificial intelligence (AI) in the world, the demand for storage semiconductors is exploding with AI servers, and it is expected that storage semiconductors will enter a "super cycle" of steady price increase in the next 2-3 years. In particular, the demand for HBM products has increased exponentially. Morgan Stanley predicts that the global HBM market will increase from $3 billion in 2023 to $53 billion in 2027.
According to "Korea Economy" reported on September 22nd, Samsung Electronics recently informed its major customers that it will raise the price of product contract transactions (bulk) in the fourth quarter, with DRAM rising by 15%-30% and NAND rising by 5%-10%.
Morgan Stanley also pointed out in a recent report that the price of NAND Flash (a nonvolatile flash chip mainly used for large-capacity data storage) is likely to continue to rise in the fourth quarter of 2025 and is expected to continue until 2026. CFM flash memory market, a well-known market research institution, also predicts that the storage market price will rise in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Huaxin Securities Research Report believes that the first wave of price increase in storage began in April this year, when Samsung was the first to announce that it would gradually stop producing DDR4 memory particles this year, thus focusing on producing DDR5, LPDDR5 and HBM memories with higher end and higher profit. After that, SK Hynix also began to gradually reduce DDR4 production capacity, and plans to reduce DDR4 production capacity to about 20%. The second wave of price increase in storage began in September, and SanDisk announced that it would increase the price of products for all channels and consumers by more than 10%. In the future, it will continue to conduct regular price evaluation and may make other adjustments. Recently, Micron Technology issued a notice to channel providers, announcing that the price of its storage products will increase by 20%-30%. At the same time, Qunlian also announced to follow up and suspend the quotation, and the specific increase will depend on the market dynamics. A number of ultra-large-scale cloud vendors have placed large additional orders for NAND enterprise-class solid-state drives, which are shifting the supply of NAND from the consumer market to the enterprise market.
Huaxin Securities said that because the original production capacity tends to shift to high-profit products such as HBM (high-bandwidth memory) and DDR5, and it is hoped that the production capacity will be given priority to high value-added products, the head storage manufacturers have given the time point for LPDDR4X to stop production, among which Micron and SK Hynix will stop receiving new orders at the end of this year. The market expects that Samsung will gradually stop production in 2026, and the production capacity of domestic manufacturers will also tilt to LPDDR5X. Behind the discontinuation of DDR4 and LPDDR4X, DRAM storage manufacturers should respond to the emerging AI market, start to speed up the process conversion, and tend to develop the next generation of DDR5 and HBM. The recent price increases of DDR5 and NAND Flash are also related to the upsurge of AI infrastructure construction. OpenAI announced this week that it will build five new AI data centers in the United States. It is estimated that the total investment will exceed 400 billion US dollars in the next three years, and AI development still needs a lot of AI infrastructure. Huaxin Securities believes that domestic storage plants will significantly benefit from the new wave of price increase in storage.
Editor: Wan Jianwei
Proofreading:Liao shengchao