According to market analyst qinbafrank, merely releasing more large models, disclosing higher token usage, or continuing to increase capital expenditures is no longer sufficient to alleviate market concerns about AI investment returns. He believes the market is now focused on a set of fundamental signals that corroborate one another, including sustained expansion of AI revenue streams, concurrent growth in enterprise customers, production-grade workloads, paid seats, renewal rates, and average spend per customer—while demand remains robust even after excluding a few major clients such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Meanwhile, incremental gross profit from AI must continue to grow faster than rising costs tied to depreciation, energy, network infrastructure, and talent acquisition. As unit inference costs decline, total gross profit should keep increasing. Investors will also closely monitor whether order backlogs can accelerate into revenue over the next 12 to 24 months, whether utilization rates and customer consumption exceed initial commitments following the rollout of new compute capacity, and whether in-house chip development and model optimization deliver verifiable economic benefits. For the upcoming second-quarter earnings report, the market anticipates AI and cloud revenue exceeding expectations, margins remaining broadly stable, capital expenditures under control, and free cash flow ceasing its deterioration; if revenue quality, gross margin, and cash flow fail to improve, concerns may intensify further.