Muse sparks a new AI narrative, brokerages "call out" the next incremental track.

Title context: Muse sparks a new AI narrative, brokerages "call out" the next incremental track. Text: This week, Meta Muse ignited the AI community and the market, and was seen as "opening the next new narrative of AI demand expansion driven by products and scenarios." Later, at the Meta Connect conference, Muse undoubtedly became the center of the event: almost all the new AI hardware released at the conference was closely related to this AI Agent. Meta CEO Zuckerberg said bluntly, "The future belongs to everyone," and the core of this vision is Muse. It is expected that Muse is likely to become a superintelligence with a user scale of billions in the future. By integrating browser operations, account connections, payments, and background execution, Muse lowers the threshold for ordinary users to use AI Agents. The rapid expansion of its user scale and its daily active user numbers, which crush ChatGPT's performance over the same period, also confirm this. Compared with most previous AI Agents, one unique feature of Muse is that behind each user there is an independent cloud virtual machine. Even if the user closes the application, the task will continue to execute in the background. CPU attention has thus risen, and shares of U.S. suppliers such as Arm and Intel have risen accordingly, while AMD even hit a record high during the week. The expected CPU demand boom triggered by Muse has further spread upstream along the industrial chain. A number of brokerage institutions believe that IC substrates are expected to become an incremental segment. As the direct carrier of chip packaging, IC substrates bear the dual role of "foundation" and "bridge" between the upper-layer bare chip die and the lower-layer printed circuit board, and are key infrastructure for turning dies into usable products. Jefferies pointed out that Muse symbolizes AI Agents accelerating into the mainstream consumer market, and the massive inference, multitasking processes, and computing power demand will further drive demand in the supply chains for CPUs, PCBs, and ABF substrates. SPDB International Securities believes that it is bullish on the transmission path of "expanding user entry points increases application penetration - task frequency rises and execution load increases - demand for CPUs and substrates grows," and that application execution demand strengthens the investment mainline in CPUs and IC substrates; higher product adoption will expand server CPU demand and transmit through upgrades in package quantity, product size, and layer count to high-end IC substrates. Another research report previously published by the brokerage pointed out that the impact of AI Agents on IC substrates is not a linear transmission, but has a layer-by-layer amplification effect. On the one hand, each CPU requires one FCBGA-type ABF substrate, meaning server CPU shipments and ABF substrates have a nearly 1:1 rigid mapping, so a sharp increase in CPU shipments will proportionally drive ABF substrate demand; on the other hand, the higher performance requirements for server CPUs in the AI Agent era will also promote continuous upgrades in substrate specifications, driving increases in substrate layer count and area. According to a report by South Korea's Meritz Securities, Samsung Electro-Mechanics has signed a long-term MLCC agreement with a North American CPU manufacturer, and the company's Vietnam plant is also seeing growing ABF substrate shipments to a North American CPU manufacturer. The latest performance disclosed by IC substrate suppliers also confirms the strong demand. For example, Kinsus Interconnect Technology released its August results on September 23, with monthly revenue of NT$4.81 billion (about RMB 1.02 billion), a year-on-year increase of 40.6%. The main driver of business growth came from high-end ABF substrates. The company said demand for high-end products is strong, and the current ABF substrate capacity utilization rate is about 85%, and is expected to further increase to 95% by the end of the year; among them, the relatively tight supply is mainly for high-layer-count ABF, while supply and demand for mid- and low-layer-count products are relatively balanced. As North American AI chip and large cloud vendor customers gradually clarify demand and inventory forecasts for subsequent platforms, some customers have already begun discussing capacity allocation for 2027-2029. In response to medium- and long-term demand, Kinsus plans to increase monthly ABF capacity in 2027 by 25% on the basis of the end of 2026, with the new capacity mainly for high-end AI substrates. This article is reprinted from "Cailian Press," author: Zheng Yuanfang; GMTEight editor: Xu Wenqiang.