BlockBeats News, August 13th. Chief Economist of New Fire Group, Fu Peng, pointed out that the latest negative free cash flow of Tencent is similar to Alibaba, Meta from Silicon Valley, Google, and other tech giants, where large-scale AI capital expenditure has disrupted the previous model of high free cash flow plus stable buybacks and dividends.

Fu Peng believes that the market's tolerance for the misalignment between AI investment and return has significantly decreased since Q2 this year. Application-side revenue is still in the validation stage relative to the cumulative hundreds of billions of dollars invested, and investors need to see quantifiable long-term returns. The current investor sentiment has shifted from early enthusiasm to caution, and the next few quarters are a critical window. Investor sentiment has shifted from the previous years' enthusiasm to caution, which means that realistically optimistic and quantifiable revenue growth must be seen to dispel this investor doubt.

Therefore, during this period of "ROI proof or disproof" waiting, as long as there is no significant external systemic shock, the overall situation will maintain a kind of dilemma of "must invest, but investing is also risky". The market's performance is: there is fundamental support on the downside/dare not easily go short, and there is ROI scrutiny on the upside/dare not blindly go long.

The capital market is awaiting the "Killer App," while the industry is actually waiting for the "breakthrough point of unit computing cost" and the "tipping point of workflow restructuring."