HK Stock Market Move | AI hardware stocks fall again as Google faces cash flow pressure and surging borrowing; market continues to focus on cloud providers' capex growth rate.

AI hardware stocks fell again. As of press time, DELTON (01989) dropped 7.85% to HK$68.05; Cig Shanghai (06166) fell 7.24% to HK$69.85; Zhongji Innolight (03308) declined 6.94% to HK$730.5; YOFC (06869) dropped 6.18% to HK$104.7. On the news front, Google parent Alphabet reported third-quarter revenue and profit that both missed expectations. In the third quarter, Alphabet's capital expenditure was US$51.4 billion, below the market expectation of US$55.8 billion. Even with somewhat restrained capex, the company's free cash flow was still negative US$9.1 billion, marking the second consecutive quarter of negative free cash flow, while the market had previously expected negative US$3.5 billion. In addition, Alphabet's borrowing scale climbed sharply in the third quarter, with long-term debt rising from US$21.6 billion a year earlier to US$125.1 billion, an increase of about 479%. Founder previously pointed out that the continued expansion of capex by cloud providers is an important support for this round of AI hardware market performance, but the rise in investment scale and stock price gains do not always move in sync. Whether the market expectation that the growth rate of cloud providers' capex has peaked in this round holds true may have significant guiding significance for the sustainability of future AI hardware stock performance.