As of last Friday's close in the US stock market, the storage chip and AI hardware supply chain collectively exploded against the trend, with SanDisk surging 11.9% in a single day, and SK Hynix and Micron Technology rising over 8% and 6%, respectively; after the close, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced quarterly adjustments to its constituents, with Bloom Energy, Illumina, and Everpure being added to the S&P 500 index, and Dell, Palo Alto Networks, Arista Networks, and SanDisk added to the S&P 100 index. Among them, Bloom Energy, having already surged 7.35% intraday due to a significant performance increase, jumped over 5% again after hours due to the inclusion announcement. Nvidia's latest acquisition is reshuffling storage capacity allocation, and the boom in AI capital expenditure is spreading from individual stock performance to the core index weight of US stocks. With the market opening imminent, what information regarding AI, chips, and cybersecurity should still be focused on?
1. The Comprehensive Explosion of AI Storage Power: From Nvidia's Acquisition to the Supply Chain of Structural Shortages in Storage
The current explosion in storage chip stocks is not driven by a single favorable factor, but is the result of three lines of clues tightening simultaneously.
First, the trigger is Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face, moving from computing power competition into the development process. Nvidia confirmed on September 3 that it would acquire the AI development platform Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion—this open-source model and dataset hosting community, often referred to as the "GitHub of AI", has gathered over 18 million developers and more than 200,000 companies leveraging it to search, assess, customize, and deploy AI models. Nvidia has long been dominant in the computing power market, and the intent behind the acquisition is not the computing power itself, but to intervene earlier in the entire process of "being chosen to being used" in AI: the competition in recent years has revolved around model capabilities, but another race is accelerating—who can enable these capabilities to be used by more people and generate ongoing revenue? Open models precisely bring competition into the question of "what to do after finding a model," and Hugging Face is precisely at the intersection of validating effects, integrating business, and deploying operations. What Nvidia is truly acquiring is the long-term accumulated trust and developer habits of this platform, which are difficult to replicate in the short term.
Open models lower the threshold for businesses to use AI, and whether training or deploying, these applications ultimately need to be grounded in AI servers and data centers: they require both Nvidia's GPUs and high-bandwidth memory and large-capacity flash storage from companies like SanDisk to store model weights and data. That evening, SanDisk surged 11.9% in a single day, closing at $1,740, with a cumulative increase of over 550% for the year; SK Hynix rose 8.14% on its US listing; Micron Technology increased by 6.1%; and Intel rose by 4.51%.
Second, the supply structure is being redefined by AI. A deeper driving factor is that the allocation of production capacity in the storage industry is leaning towards AI: to meet the strong demand from AI servers and data centers for high-margin products like high-bandwidth memory (HBM), major manufacturers such as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are continuously directing production capacity towards enterprise-level/AI server product lines, directly compressing the supply of consumer-grade storage—this is also the reason why, even with weakened demand for PCs and smartphones, DRAM and NAND prices remain high. Dell's Chief Operating Officer previously stated that the current supply bottleneck "can be summed up in just a few words: DRAM, DRAM, DRAM, followed by NAND, NAND, NAND." According to industry data, in the second quarter, DRAM and NAND prices saw a month-on-month increase of nearly 60%, and although there has been some cooling in the third quarter, they are still expected to rise by 13%—18% and 10%—15%, respectively.
Third, the shortage is structural, not just a one-time cyclical fluctuation. New advanced storage wafer fabs typically take 3 to 5 years to form effective production capacity, and institutions generally believe that the current AI-driven storage shortage is structural rather than cyclical, making it difficult to relieve through rapid expansion in the short term. Because of this, even though the increase is remarkable, SanDisk's current valuation is only about eight times forward-looking price-to-earnings ratio, and storage authorities still consider this valuation not expensive—this also provides the underlying support for this conduction chain to ultimately reach the adjustments of the S&P index constituents: a real supply-demand gap, rather than merely sentiment-driven capital speculation.
2. The Surge of Bloom Energy: Performance Far Exceeds Expectations Coinciding with Inclusion in the S&P 500 Index
On the individual stock level, the most eye-catching is the series of rises from Bloom Energy (BE), a hydrogen fuel cell power generation company. The company recently announced a second-quarter revenue of $1.07 billion, a year-on-year increase of 166%; adjusted EBITDA reached $253.4 million, far exceeding Wall Street's expectation of $149.4 million. The strong demand for electricity from AI data centers: currently, all major hyperscale cloud service providers in the US, along with over ten emerging cloud computing, AI laboratories and data center hosting operators, have verified and adopted Bloom's fuel cell power generation solutions; data from the International Energy Agency shows that the electricity demand growth from AI data centers is as high as 50%, far exceeding the global average electricity growth of about 3%.
On the day of the performance announcement, Bloom Energy's stock price surged 7.35% intraday, closing at $252.87, with a market capitalization of $74.48 billion, an increase of 506.8% compared to before; after hours, as the S&P Dow Jones Indices announced its inclusion in the S&P 500 index, the stock price jumped over 5% again, closing at $266.14.
3. Comprehensive Analysis of the S&P Dow Jones Index Quarterly Adjustments: Chips, Cloud Hardware and Cybersecurity Fully Positioned
After the market closed on September 4, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the list of adjustments for the third quarter of the S&P 500 index series. The newly added companies are almost entirely concentrated in the fields of chips, cloud hardware, and cybersecurity, as the index warrants are leveraging passive fund readjustments to shift weights from traditional consumer, real estate, and industrial stocks to the AI infrastructure supply chain.
New additions to the S&P 500: Bloom Energy stands out as a core incremental target, thanks to the 166% revenue explosion in the second quarter and an upgrade in annual guidance; genome sequencing company Illumina was included after raising its full-year revenue guidance in July, gaining about 1%—1.7% after-hours following the announcement; and computer storage company Everpure saw an after-hours increase of about 1.5%—2.2% due to exceeding performance expectations. All four new spots in the S&P 100 index were taken by tech companies in the AI capital expenditure supply chain—Dell's stock has increased by about 316% this year, making it the largest gainer among the newly added stocks; Palo Alto Networks has risen about 78% this year, outperforming the S&P 500 index (which has increased by about 12%) by 66 percentage points; Arista Networks has also exceeded 40% growth this year, with its switch products being key infrastructure connecting GPU clusters in AI data centers; SanDisk stands out as the stock with the most significant overall growth in the index, with a cumulative increase exceeding 550% this year.
4. Worth Noting: In the New Inclusion List, These AI Chip and Cybersecurity Companies Are Worth Continuously Tracking
As passive funds begin to systematically chase the AI capital expenditure chain, which companies in this newly included index list still have early-stage fundamental stories worth continuously tracking?
Palo Alto Networks: After the fourth fiscal quarter performance surpassed expectations announced on September 1, Benchmark analyst Yi Fu Lee raised the target price from $340 to $400, citing that AI infrastructure construction is driving a simultaneous explosion in cybersecurity demand, with the company's Prisma Cloud security platform and unified AI security platform Prisma AIRS performing strongly; however, its price-to-earnings ratio has reached about 173.6 times, so whether it can continue to realize the narrative of the "AI security stack" through subsequent performance is the variable that needs to be validated.
Arista Networks: As a switch supplier connecting GPU clusters in AI data centers, the company has already seen a more than 40% increase this year, with the market average target price around $241, indicating an approximate 24% upside potential from the current stock price, making it less fully priced among the newly added names.
Bloom Energy: Company management cited industry data indicating that by 2027, the global AI data center's newly installed capacity will reach 30—40 gigawatts, while Bloom's currently deployed fuel cell capacity is only about 1.5 gigawatts, meaning the supply-demand gap is just beginning to open the growth space; alongside a $25 billion financing agreement with Brookfield and an order backlog totaling approximately $20 billion (of which product orders are about $6 billion, a year-on-year increase of approximately 2.5 times), Wall Street's average target price is about $275, suggesting some upward expectation compared to the latest stock price post-index inclusion.
SanDisk: Despite a year-to-date increase exceeding 550%, making it the highest gainer in this round of overall index growth, its current forward-looking price-to-earnings ratio of around eight times is still significantly below the overall valuation center of the storage and AI hardware sectors during the same period, making it one of the few companies in this trend where the "increase is significant, yet the valuation does not seem expensive."
Dell: As a representative of AI servers, the company's backlog of AI orders has reached $95 billion, with a conversion scale of AI demand amounting to $131.7 billion over the past 12 months; the index inclusion itself has a limited marginal impact, and the real pricing anchor remains the pacing of AI server order fulfillment in the subsequent quarters.
Overall, these companies are strategically positioned along different segments of the AI supply chain—cybersecurity, data center networks, power infrastructure, storage chips, and AI servers. The inclusion in the index is more a "confirmation" of this fundamental market trend rather than a starting point; whether they can continue to outperform depends on whether their respective quarterly performances can meet the current high expectations.
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