In a report, Nomura economists Ting Lu and Jing Wang pointed out that after the Democratic Party won both houses of Congress and the gubernatorial elections in some key states, local governments may strengthen the approval of data centers, the procurement of clean energy, and the regulation of electricity prices, restricting developers from passing on the costs of grid upgrades, transmission capacity expansion, and new power generation to residents, thus extending the cycle from site selection to grid connection for large data centers in the United States. Nomura believes that the slowdown in the expansion of US cloud vendors may alleviate the global shortage of GPU, HBM, and advanced packaging capacity, and the cost for Chinese companies to purchase related hardware through intermediate trade hubs is expected to decrease. Previously, the gray market prices of GPUs and HBMs in some restricted areas of Asian logistics hubs reached 2-3 times the official list price, and the relevant premium may shrink as overseas demand cools down. Nvidia's stock fell by about 12% in the two trading days following the election. Morgan Stanley, from an investment strategy perspective, suggests prioritizing the theme of self-reliance and controllability of China's semiconductor, computing power, power equipment, and domestic AI infrastructure, rather than export supply chains that rely on global AI capital expenditure.
