付鹏：AI叙事逻辑发生切换，市场从“奖励烧钱扩张”转向“惩罚资本消耗”

Odaily Planet Daily News: Fu Peng expressed his view that the market is currently in a vacuum period of proving or disproving AI's (complete viable business closed loop). The overheated sentiment in the market has cooled, shifting from the logic of "rewarding capital expenditure arms race" to that of "penalizing capital expenditure arms race."

In this environment, the previous punishment of Google's negative free cash flow in the US stock market and the pivot to Apple is a very typical shift. Now, the same story is unfolding among China's internet giants. Alibaba's capital expenditure (CapEx) surged sharply this quarter, resulting in continuous net outflows of FCF (free cash flow). When massive AI computing power and infrastructure investments fail to form a profit closed loop of equivalent scale in the short term, high-intensity capital spending consumes offshore cash. Investors had already begun to seriously doubt the marginal return on capital, and the global market is just half-convinced about AI's complete closed-loop narrative. As a result, the announcement of massive placement/convertible bond financing is equivalent to diluting existing shareholders' equity.

Big short Michael Burry has reduced or even cleared his position in Alibaba and instead heavily invested in or increased holdings of JD.com. The logic is the same as investors shifting from Google to Apple: whoever maintains a relatively restrained balance sheet expansion, whoever does not consume FCF to chase the AI arms race or even resort to further financing to invest, and whoever has high certainty of executing buyback plans—the market now regards them as safe.