Fu Peng: AI Capital Expenditures by Major Firms Like Alibaba and Tencent Disrupt the High Free Cash Flow and Stable Buyback Dividend Structure

Odaily News, Fu Peng, Chief Economist of Xinhuo Group, stated on X platform that Tencent's latest free cash flow has turned negative. The substantial increase in AI capital expenditures by Alibaba, Tencent, and Silicon Valley giants such as Meta and Google has disrupted the previous "high free cash flow with stable buybacks and dividends" structure. Over the past period, the market has been optimistic about AI, believing that such large capital expenditures represent a long-term competitive advantage in the future.

He stated that starting from the second quarter of this year, the market's tolerance for the mismatch between investment and returns has declined, and sentiment has become more cautious. Currently, the revenue generated at the application level is still in a validation phase compared to cumulative investments reaching hundreds of billions, and the high capital expenditures need to correspond with quantifiable long-term return expectations. The coming quarters will be a critical window period, as investor sentiment has shifted from the positivity seen in previous years to caution. Only by seeing truly quantifiable and certain revenue growth can investor doubts be dispelled. The same scale of capital expenditures may lead to different outcomes under varying investor sentiment.