Mr. Xiaolong's Today's Perspective ——Why did the US stock index and risk assets decline, while storage and optical communication have strengthened against the trend? The core reason is that the market is completing a clear AI narrative rotation: shifting from 'who can tell AI stories' to' who can truly get orders from AI capital expenditures'. The expectation of interest rate hikes suppresses overall valuations and discounted future cash flows, but the industry logic of storage and optical communication is based on the fact that "AI infrastructure is truly expanding" and cannot be interrupted by interest rates. This logical hierarchy is very clear: 1. The "precise" impact of interest rate hikes is on software and forward valuations. The probability of a rate hike in September has skyrocketed to about 60%. In a high interest rate environment, the discounted value of forward cash flows is lowered, and the first to be hurt are inevitably software stocks and growth stocks that have not yet made profits. So, on that day, the software ETF fell by about 2.4%, in sharp contrast to the semiconductor sector. Whether the Federal Reserve raises interest rates has little impact on the current demand for AI hardware. The capital expenditure cycle of cloud vendors and the expansion pace of AI computing power clusters are not determined by short-term interest rates. 2. The driving force of storage: AI systems are "devouring" storage rather than "consuming" it. Micron will increase its HBM monthly production capacity to approximately 100000 wafers by the end of the year, almost doubling it; Mizuho explicitly stated that "storage has become a key bottleneck in the entire semiconductor supply chain". UBS has raised its forecast for the year-on-year growth rate of HBM average price from 67% to approximately 79%. The key logic is that AI systems are reducing the HBM configuration of individual chips, but expanding the cluster size through more GPUs, memory pooling, and high-speed optical interconnection is accelerating the overall demand expansion. SanDisk rose nearly 12% on the day, Micron rose over 6%, Seagate and Western Digital rose over 6% and 5.8% respectively. 3. The driving force of optical communication: 1.6T high-volume+AI cluster expansion. AI data centers are shifting from "single rack computing power" to "cluster interconnection", and optical communication is the direct beneficiary of this trend. Maiweier Technology rose over 7%, Corning rose 5.7%, and Lumentum rose 4%. The latest release of GPT-6 Astra by OpenAI is seen by the market as a signal of continued upgrading of AI capabilities, and the massive infrastructure investment plans between companies such as OpenAI and giants such as Microsoft and Oracle are continuously strengthening the visibility of AI hardware demand. Let's summarize in one sentence: The market is not betting on whether interest rates will decrease, but on whether AI capital expenditures will stop. As long as the demand for AI computing power continues to expand and orders for storage and optical communication continue to increase, the suppression of interest rates on these sectors is just noise. Therefore, storage and optical communication can go against the trend and stand out alone!