Qianwen's milk tea, and Zhipu's price hike

Today's price action of Zhipu is quite interesting. A few days ago, we were still sipping on Dad's milk tea, but today it feels like we're old and broke—what's missed is missed. If you don't understand, just ask. Putting these four together—$BABA-W(09988.HK) $TENCENT(00700.HK) $KNOWLEDGE ATLAS(02513.HK) $MINIMAX-WP(00100.HK)—under the China narrative, the hype around "AI selling shovels" has actually shifted. It's not that they're not selling shovels anymore, but that shovels are being treated, managed, and priced as "public infrastructure."

1. Big Tech AI is more like "public utility infrastructure": With hard constraints like employment friendliness, content and algorithm governance, and nuisance thresholds upfront, profit realization naturally lags. Therefore, for the stock price to move, it's less about "how hot the product is" and more about whether it can translate into "verifiable revenue growth/efficiency gains" on the financial statements (cloud revenue, ARPU, ad ROI, cost-cutting efficiency improvements without layoffs).

2. Pure-play AI stocks are more like "options": As long as hard signals like price hikes/subscriptions/orders/renewals appear, the market dares to revalue them immediately—the elasticity comes from "purity + scarcity + shareholding structure." Zhipu's recent move is almost textbook: a hot technology narrative isn't surprising; pricing power is the real game-changer.

In a nutshell: Both are called AI, but pure-play AI stocks feed on 'option revaluation,' while big tech feeds on 'profit realization'—get the framework wrong, and you'll misread the price moves.