CLSA's latest research indicates that Agentic AI is transitioning from experimental phases into enterprise workflows, establishing itself as the next-generation infrastructure layer. Chinese AI models are rapidly narrowing the performance gap with global leaders and gaining international market share through superior cost efficiency.
The brokerage has assigned a "High Conviction Outperform" rating to Tencent (00700) and an "Outperform" rating to both Alibaba-W (09988) and Zhipu (02513). According to the report, enterprises are shifting their focus from purely pursuing model capabilities to balancing performance, cost, and deployment flexibility, making multi-model adoption the emerging trend.
CLSA projects that hyperscale cloud providers operating across chips, models, computing power, and application layers will capture the greatest opportunities. The firm anticipates that a surge in AI applications will trigger the next global cloud supercycle, with the worldwide public cloud market expected to double to $2.3 trillion by 2028, creating an annual revenue opportunity exceeding $1 trillion.
Within this landscape, CLSA favors full-stack cloud and AI vendors whose integrated proprietary chips, models, cloud infrastructure, development tools, and applications form a powerful competitive moat. The report identifies software, video streaming, on-demand services, recruitment, and online travel as potentially vulnerable sectors, with Tencent and Alibaba emerging as the preferred investment choices.
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