Let me start with the conclusion: I believe the storage sector's rally is nearing its end, and I am bullish on the software sector going forward.

If we compare the AI industry to gold prospecting, hardware companies are like the shovel sellers, while software and application companies are the actual gold diggers.
Selling shovels is certainly a surefire business with the highest certainty, but ultimately whether the entire industry can make money depends on whether the application layer can find gold.
Currently, the market generally looks down on the software industry, believing it will be disrupted by AI. But have you considered that if the application layer fails to deliver in the future, the shovel sellers will be building castles in the air and will also collapse?
What's even more absurd is that previously, the profits from selling shovels were taken by companies like NVDA and AVGO, at least all American companies, with money flowing from one pocket to another.
But now that the raw materials for producing shovels (HBM) are in short supply, it turns out that the raw material sellers are starting to take the lion's share of the profits.
From an industry chain perspective, everyone knows that the current bottleneck is memory, but from a political standpoint, this situation is unsustainable.
The Americans have painstakingly laid out the entire AI industry chain, only to find that the majority of the profits are being taken by their little brother, South Korea.
The recent collective price hikes by Apple and Microsoft are a form of pressure on the Trump administration. I believe Trump will step in and take action.
On one hand, they will bring in companies like CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies) to address part of the consumer demand; on the other hand, they will politically pressure the South Korean government to demand that the two companies expand production and cap prices.
The South Koreans are still too cunning. When a rare industry opportunity finally arrives, they want to drain the pond to catch all the fish. In the end, they may cause the Korean retail investors who chased the rally to lose everything, even their families.
In this regard, TSMC is much smarter. Even though it monopolizes the global market, it only takes reasonable profits, allowing it to do business sustainably and even become a "national guardian mountain."