CSC Securities: 2027 AI Investment to Shift from Spending to ROI, Focus on Domestic Compute

The call marks a shift in how the sell side frames China's AI trade: from narrative-driven capex hopes toward measurable returns, with domestic chip localization and application commercialization as the swing factors. That framing touches the whole A-share AI complex — compute hardware, model developers and application vendors — and implies earnings proof will matter more than spending announcements. The open question is whether model ARR and token growth, which the note describes as exponential, translate into visible revenue before the ROI test arrives.