The Zhitong Finance App learned that on March 19, the Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission and other departments recently issued the “Shanghai New Infrastructure Construction Project Interest Rate Management Guidelines (2024 Edition)” to encourage partner banks to establish preferential interest rate credit funds for new infrastructure construction in Shanghai, with a total scale of more than 100 billion yuan, which clearly focuses on supporting computing power infrastructure represented by computing power networks, general computing power facilities, intelligent computing power facilities, and high-performance computing power facilities. The Tianfeng Securities Research Report said that in order to speed up localization and replacement, the government side and market players are making concerted efforts to catch up with the computing power gap. With the continued focus of domestic computing power infrastructure and domestic computing power, manufacturers related to the industrial chain have ushered in investment opportunities. Related targets: ZTE (00763), China Mobile (00941), China Telecom (00728), China Unicom (00726).

Qiu Wenjin, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission, said that the new infrastructure interest rate discount policy is an important step for Shanghai to guide social capital to further increase investment in the field of new infrastructure. Since its implementation in 2020, good results have been achieved. From 2020 to 2022, Shanghai implemented a total of three batches of preferential interest rate loans and interest rate subsidies for new infrastructure, with a cumulative additional investment of about 20 billion yuan, and cooperative banks provided more than 9 billion yuan in preferential interest rate loans.

This time, the “Guiding Opinions” adjusted “the interest rate for loans of 5 years or more” to “the interest rate for loans over 5 years will be reduced by 70 basis points or more to the five-year LPR”; projects that meet the requirements in key regions such as the five new cities and north-south transformation will all enjoy a maximum interest rate discount of 1.5 percentage points; the investment declaration threshold has been adjusted from 100 million yuan to 50 million yuan, etc.

Compared with the 2020 edition of the “Guiding Opinions”, Xu Heng, deputy director of the High Technology Department of the Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission, said that the new “Guiding Opinions” further highlight four policy orientations and have four “more” characteristics: lower loan interest rates, stronger interest rates, better reporting conditions, and more cooperative banks.

In terms of credit scale, the “Guiding Opinions” now favor new infrastructure projects and give priority to guarantees. Ensure that the credit fund scale is not less than 20 billion yuan in line with the implementation of Shanghai's new round of new infrastructure action plans. In terms of interest rates, special preferential interest rate loans will be set up in line with the implementation of Shanghai's new infrastructure interest rate discount policy. At the same time, it will actively seek preferential policies to effectively benefit the real economy. In terms of approval efficiency, set up a green channel for new infrastructure projects, prioritize approval, and speed up the implementation of new infrastructure projects.

In recent years, China's computing power has been growing steadily, and computing power has played a significant role in empowering it. In 2022, China's infrastructure computing power reached 180 eFlops, ranking second in the world. The layout of China's intelligent computing centers has been accelerated. As of June 2023, 25 artificial intelligence computing centers have been put into operation, and more than 20 are under construction.

Relevant state departments have successively issued plans and opinions such as the “Action Plan for High-Quality Development of Computing Power Infrastructure” and “Implementation Opinions on Further Implementing the “East Digital and Western Computing” Project to Accelerate the Construction of a National Integrated Computing Power Network, and put forward quantitative development indicators until 2025, fully demonstrating the importance and determination of China to the high-quality development of the computing power industry.

According to the Tianfeng Securities Research Report, the demand for domestic computing power is broad under the AI wave. Overseas computing power supply is limited, and domestic supply is gradually filling the gap. The bank believes that in the long run, domestic computing power may be replaced by domestic production or become a trend. In order to speed up localization and replacement, the government side and market players are making concerted efforts to catch up with the computing power gap. With the continued focus of domestic computing power infrastructure and domestic computing power, manufacturers related to the industrial chain have ushered in investment opportunities.

According to the Guangfa Securities Research Report, in the digital economy era, the communications industry will further improve information and computing power infrastructure, ensure the rational construction of digital infrastructure and highly reliable transmission of information, and on this basis, expand its own capabilities to empower the digital transformation of the industry and enterprises. It is recommended to focus on information & computing infrastructure. The digital transformation of enterprises/industries involves relevant targets in the industrial chain.

CITIC Securities pointed out that from an investment perspective, judging the computing power side will usher in important investment opportunities: on the one hand, demand for optical modules, servers, etc. will continue to grow under AI; on the other hand, the development urgency of semiconductor equipment, AI chips, etc. will increase under overseas regulations. On this basis, some application scenarios combine the capabilities of large domestic models to carry out industrial innovation, open up a ceiling of growth through the AI+SaaS model, and performance will gradually be unleashed.

Related concept stocks:

China Unicom (00726): China Unicom Chairman Liu Liehong pointed out that China Unicom has fully upgraded the Unicom Cloud, actively explores breakthroughs in computing, storage, and network performance to provide more variety, higher performance, more cost-effective, lower latency, and more reliable computing power supply. Continuously increasing the scale of computing power resources, Unicom Cloud's “one city, one pool” covers more than 200 cities.

ZTE (00763): ZTE's intelligent cloud card DPU flexibly offloads basic service loads such as virtualization, network, storage, and security to maximize computing power efficiency; a full range of server and storage products support liquid cooling, GPUs, and 400G bandwidth; data center switches are based on ZTE's own high-performance switching, forwarding, and CPU chips, and the bandwidth has evolved smoothly from 400G to 800G.

China Mobile (00941): China Mobile will launch a new “capability+computing power” package that can be flexibly configured and freely combined. It has now built a “3+2+1" computing power terminal product system. “3” refers to building three thin terminal products: cloud phones, cloud computers, and mobile cloud HD. “2” refers to building two types of fat terminals: Wangpu computing power hosts and computing power home hosts. “1” refers to building a unified cloud OS platform to achieve unified management and unified resource scheduling for computing power terminal products.

China Telecom (00728): China Telecom now has more than 700 data centers, more than 3,000 edge computing centers, and 513,000 IDC racks. The rack utilization rate has exceeded 70%. By the end of 2023, China Telecom's total computing power is expected to reach 6.2 Eflops.