First, the conclusion: I believe the storage market rally is coming to an end, and I am optimistic about the software sector going forward.

If we compare the AI industry to gold mining, hardware companies are like the shovel sellers, while software and application companies are the ones actually mining gold. Selling shovels is certainly a sure profit with the highest certainty, but whether it ultimately makes money depends on whether the application layer can find gold.
The market is generally bearish on the software industry, believing it will be disrupted by AI. Have we considered that if the application layer fails to deliver in the future, the shovel sellers will also collapse?
What's even more absurd is that the profits from shovel selling used to go to companies like NVDA, but now it turns out that raw materials for making shovels (HBM) are in short supply, and surprisingly, the raw material sellers have started taking the lion's share of profits.
From an industry chain perspective, everyone knows that the bottleneck is currently storage, but from a political perspective, this situation is unsustainable.
The US has painstakingly laid out the entire AI industry chain, only to find that the lion's share of profits has been taken by South Korea, its little brother.
The recent collective price increases by Apple and Microsoft are a form of pressure on Trump, and I believe Trump will take action going forward.
On one hand, introducing ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) to meet some of the consumer demand; on the other hand, pressuring the South Korean government politically to demand the two companies expand production and limit prices.
South Koreans are too calculating. They finally have an industry opportunity and want to fish the pond dry, which may eventually cause the Korean retail investors who chased the rally to lose everything.
In this regard, TSMC is much smarter. Although it monopolizes the global market, it only takes reasonable profits, allowing it to do business sustainably and even become a national guardian mountain.