The AI wave continues to tumble. As global investors are extremely optimistic about Nvidia's chip demand for AI training/inference, the “AI seller” Nvidia, which has a share of more than 90% in this field, can be described as the biggest beneficiary of the investment frenzy surrounding AI in the US stock market. The stock soared about 231% in 2023.

Of course, with the continuous innovation and iteration of technology and the abundance of application scenarios, the software and hardware market surrounding AI is also showing an explosive growth trend. In addition to the semiconductor industry chain, several AI-related software and hardware companies have already embarked on a “soaring” channel in stock prices.

Among US stock companies, Dell's stock price more than doubled in 2023. As a well-known PC company, Dell's core business mainly consists of two parts, namely Infrastructure Solutions and Customer Solutions Group. The former mainly targets the enterprise market and provides products such as servers and enterprise solutions; the latter mainly targets the consumer market and produces consumer electronic products such as PCs.

Since the PC market began to adjust in 2022, servers have relayed to be the driving engine supporting Dell's growth. Now using the AI server concept, even though Dell's overall revenue for the full year of the previous fiscal year decreased by 13.1 billion US dollars, it still did not affect the market's optimism about this year's performance.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, the US PC market experienced a strong rebound. According to the latest report released by Canalys, in the fourth quarter of 2023, US PC shipments increased 3.3% year-on-year to 16.7 million units. The consumer market grew 15.1% year over year, driven by the holiday season. The rebound in the US PC market indicates that the market will usher in growth in the next two years, and the performance of the US PC market will show a strong trend in 2024 and 2025.

Looking ahead, the PC market is still very optimistic. Canalys expects year-on-year growth in the US PC market to reach 7% and 10% in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

Dell executives revealed at a press conference that in the short term, there are two types of PCs on the market, equipped with AI hardware and those without AI hardware, but in the long run, all personal PCs will become AI PCs. As defined by IDC, an AI PC is a PC with specific system-on-chip (SoC) capabilities, capable of running generative AI tasks locally.

Canalys anticipates that 2024 will be the beginning of AI PC release, and 2025 will become the mainstream product in the market. 2026 will account for more than half of total PC sales, and the share of shipments will rise to 60% in 2027. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have reached a tipping point, and demand from companies, industries, and countries around the world is surging.” Nvidia founder and CEO Wong In-hoon said during a conference call.

In addition to Dell, the stock price of another US server manufacturer, ultra-microcomputers, has also surged due to AI since the end of last year. On March 1, the US stock price rose by more than 10% after the market, with a cumulative increase of more than 60% in February. What is even more surprising is that Ultra Micro's latest stock price has surpassed 900 US dollars, which is nearly 30 times higher than when it was at the level of 30 US dollars for many years before 2023. On March 2, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that ultra-microcomputers will be included in the S&P 500 Index to focus on.

According to this, as the only Hong Kong stock company, Lenovo Group's stock price “hit rock bottom” last year and obtained a yield of more than 80% in 2023, but if you look at the extended cycle, the company ignored the macro cycle and bucked the trend of the Hong Kong stock market. It has been in a six-year trend bull market, and holders have received a yield of up to 337%.

As the world's leading PC leader and the top three AI servers, Lenovo Group's position advantage in the industry is outstanding. Financial data for the latest quarter shows that for the third fiscal quarter of the 2023/24 fiscal year, Lenovo Group's revenue was 113.6 billion yuan, up 3% year on year; net profit was nearly 2.6 billion yuan, and profitability improved sequentially for two consecutive quarters. As the PC industry's inventory removal comes to an end, Lenovo Group's core business, the personal PC business, is returning to a growth trajectory: in an environment where global PC market shipments fell 2.7% year on year during the same period, Lenovo Group further consolidated its position as the number one PC in the world with growth significantly higher than the market growth rate (5.8 pts), the highest since the pandemic.

Currently, the global storm of generative AI is ushering in a critical period of implementation. On the 18th of this month, during GTC2024, the global AI event, Lenovo Group and NVIDIA announced a partnership to launch a new hybrid artificial intelligence solution to help enterprises and cloud providers obtain the critical accelerated computing capabilities needed to succeed in the AI era, and transform artificial intelligence from concept to reality.

These hybrid solutions are designed to efficiently bring artificial intelligence into customer data where and when users need it most, whether in the pocket or in the cloud. This move will advance Lenovo Group's AI for All vision and support the rapid entry of innovative architectures for the next generation of large-scale generative artificial intelligence into the market. Lenovo's hybrid solution has been optimized to run NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to enable secure, supported, and stable production-grade AI, and will now also provide developers with newly released NVIDIA microservices, including NVIDIA NIM and NeMo Retriever.

In terms of efficiently enhancing AI workloads on a large scale, Lenovo Group announced the expansion of the ThinkSystem AI product portfolio. This is an industry-changing milestone, including two new powerful 8-channel NVIDIA GPU systems designed to provide massive computing power and unrivaled energy efficiency to accelerate the implementation of artificial intelligence. Designed specifically for generative artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), and large language model (LLM) development, it supports the market entry of the NVIDIA HGX AI computing platform.

The new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3 is a 5U system using Lenovo Neptune liquid cooling technology, with a power usage efficiency (PUE) of up to 1.1. By using direct water cooling of the CPU and GPU and NVIDIA NVSwitch technology, the system can maintain maximum performance without reaching any thermal limitations. Additionally, the new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR680a V3 is an air-cooled two-socket system that provides maximum acceleration for complex artificial intelligence equipped with an Intel processor and NVIDIA GPU. The highly accelerated system provides tremendous computing power and uses an industry-standard 19-inch server rack, allowing intensive hardware configurations to maximize efficiency while not taking up too much space. Lenovo also unveiled the new PG8A0N, an ultimate 1U node designed specifically for AI.

“We are at a critical turning point. Thanks to continuous improvements in real-time computing, energy efficiency, and ease of deployment, new AI application scenarios are rapidly emerging. Through close collaboration with NVIDIA, Lenovo has made significant advances in efficiency, performance, and cost, which not only accelerates the deployment of AI applications in various industries, but also helps companies gain insight from their data sets, whether it's improving the retail experience, transforming the face of cities, or advancing intelligent manufacturing to a new level.” Kirk Skaugen, executive vice president of Lenovo Group and president of Infrastructure Solutions Business Group (ISG), said.

Undoubtedly, the sharp rise in stock prices of PC manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and Ultra Micro is a positive feedback on AI's performance. Many institutions are optimistic about AI's driving effect. With the further development and popularization of AI technology, new PC devices such as AI PCs are rapidly becoming new favorites in the market. They not only changed our lifestyle and work model, but also brought huge business opportunities and development space to these AI-related PC manufacturers.