The signal for a price increase in cloud gaming has appeared

Signals of price increases in the cloud upstream have emerged, and computing power has entered a new upward cycle.

Guosheng Securities analysts Liu Gaochang and Chen Zhijing recently released a research report focusing on the current price increase trends in the cloud upstream market and the new upward cycle in the computing power industry.

The report points out that with the launch of deep thinking models such as Deepseek R1 and OpenAI o1/o3, the demand for high-performance computing at the inference end is rapidly being released. Major companies like Alibaba and Tencent are quickly expanding their capital expenditures, with a quarterly capital expenditure increase of over 250% in the fourth quarter of 2024, marking the official entry of the cloud upstream into a new upward cycle.

Guosheng Securities analysis believes that there are signs of price increases in various fields such as cloud computing, IDC, servers, GPUs, and computing power leasing, validating the improvement in the prosperity of the cloud upstream industry, which may benefit leading companies in various segments of the industrial chain.

The phenomenon of price increases in the cloud upstream is spreading comprehensively

According to the report analysis, the phenomenon of price increases in the cloud upstream has recently manifested in multiple fields. Taking AWS as an example, on March 4, the price of H100 cloud computing calls increased by about 22% compared to two weeks ago, reflecting the gradual rise in high-performance computing prices.

In the IDC data center field, the demand for global intelligent computing centers has surged, especially in the North American market, where supply is relatively tight due to factors such as electricity and heat dissipation. The report shows that service fees for data centers in North America have significantly increased in 2023, with the highest service fee increase exceeding 60%.

In the domestic market, leading IDC service providers have significantly increased their listing rates, and resources in core cities are relatively tight. As IDC upgrades to AIDC (AI Data Center), coupled with the continuously rising demand for AI applications, rents for AI-specific data centers are also expected to rise.

The report concludes that the demand for global intelligent computing centers is experiencing explosive growth, while the supply side is constrained by infrastructure limitations such as electricity and heat dissipation, leading to a significant rise in rental levels—this supply-demand imbalance is unlikely to ease in the short term, and the price increase trend may continue.

GPU and server market supply is tight

As the core components of AI computing power, the GPU and server markets are also showing a clear trend of price increases, primarily driven by explosive growth in demand Driven by the DeepSeek craze, major manufacturers have a strong demand for NVIDIA H20 chips. The report cites that the current price of an 8-card machine is around 1.1 million yuan, an increase of at least 100,000 yuan compared to the beginning of the year.

In the computing power leasing market, card sources and funding advantages have become core competitiveness.

The report uses CoreWeave, a computing power leasing company in which NVIDIA has a stake, as an example. As of March 2025, the leasing price for an 8-card H100 server is 49.24/hour, compared to 49.24/hour in April 2023, an increase of 29.31% from the price of 38.08/hour in April 2023, reflecting the urgent demand from enterprises for real-time inference computing power services.

The main content of this article comes from the research report "Signs of Price Increases in Cloud Computing" published by Liu Gaochang and Chen Zhijing of Guosheng Securities on March 22