Elon Musk's remarks have catalyzed the storage chip sector on the A-share market, and humanoid robots have unlocked a new trillion-yuan incremental demand.

On October 28, the A-share storage chip sector saw a rally, with a number of constituent stocks turning red, including Ingenic (300223.SZ), CanSemi (688691.SH), GigaDevice (603986.SH), Hyuwei (300053.SZ), Chengdu Huamicro (688709.SH), Biwin Storage (688525.SH), and Guoxin Micro (688262.SH).

In terms of market news, Tesla founder Elon Musk predicted that robots will have far larger demand for memory than any other entity on Earth, and the memory capacity equipped on each robot will also double. Research institution Counterpoint recently estimated that the DRAM demand from humanoid robots will grow 20 times by 2030 compared with the current level.

New incremental demand brought by humanoid robots

The trigger of this round of market rally does not come from the news of traditional storage price hikes, but from Elon Musk's recent public statement on social platforms.

When responding to Counterpoint's report that humanoid robot DRAM demand will grow 20 times within 5 years, Musk directly called the prediction "too conservative", and stated straightforwardly that the RAM demand of robots will surpass everything else on Earth. As the executive subject operating in the physical world, humanoid robots need to continuously complete the real-time loop of perception, decision-making and atomic manipulation in the physical environment. The storage demand brought by such scenarios is structural and continuously expanding, rather than the marginal increment seen in ordinary consumer electronics.

He also added that the computing power demand of superintelligence will far exceed that of robots. This judgment directly extends the imagination space of the storage track from the current AI data centers to the long-term full-scenario implementation of physical AI.

It is worth noting that Musk's remarks are not just simple market hype, and they already correspond to Tesla's own mass production decisions behind them. Previously, Tesla has actively cut the memory configuration of the AI5 chip in half from 144GB to 72GB, and reduced the memory of the AI6 chip by one third from 216GB to 144GB. On the premise that the bandwidth and core computing power are almost not affected, all the saved memory production capacity is tilted to the mass production line of the Optimus humanoid robot. This extremely rare "active downgrade of core chips" action in the industry precisely confirms that the rigidity of storage demand for humanoid robots has exceeded the market's previous expectations: if the memory production capacity is not reallocated, the large-scale mass production of Optimus will be directly limited by the supply gap of storage chips.

Micron previously estimated that each humanoid robot will need more than 200GB of DRAM and several terabytes of NAND flash memory in the future, and the demand is equivalent to that of L4-level autonomous driving vehicles, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than current L2/L3 semi-autonomous driving vehicles. If the annual global shipment of humanoid robots reaches 1 million units in the future, the corresponding DRAM demand alone will exceed 20 billion GB, accounting for nearly half of the current global annual DRAM production capacity.

This means that the entire storage industry chain needs to reallocate its production capacity structure, shifting from the original tilt to consumer electronics and traditional servers to meeting the dual demands of AI data centers and physical AI terminals at the same time.

Track switching, who will benefit?

From the perspective of the industry's supply and demand fundamentals, the storage chip track itself is already in a high prosperity cycle. Driven by the continuous expansion of the global AI industry, the demand for AI inference infrastructure has exploded, and its growth rate far exceeds the incremental production capacity supply of major storage vendors. The current market supply shortage situation will last at least until 2027.

South Korea's leading storage vendors Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have run out of inventory, and the actual available for sale supply in 2027 will be further tightened. Data from Citi Securities' research report shows that the average selling prices of DRAM and NAND flash memory in the second quarter of 2026 rose sharply by 44% and 53% month-on-month respectively, and the high industry prosperity has been fully transmitted from the price end to the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.

For the A-share market, this narrative change is reconstructing the investment logic of the storage sector. Previously, the market's pricing anchor for storage chips was mainly based on two main lines: the demand pull from AI servers and the reversal of the industry cycle. The explosion of storage demand for humanoid robots has further amplified the growth attribute of the sector, and the track has switched from "strong cycle reversal" to "long-term structural growth".

At present, many enterprises on the A-share industrial chain have laid out relevant links in advance: Montage Technology's memory interface chips are the necessary supporting components for DDR5 memory modules, which will directly benefit from the continuous increase of DRAM capacity and the installed capacity per unit; JCET and Taiji Industrial have achieved mass HBM packaging and testing supporting services, and entered the core global AI storage supply chain; Longsys's enterprise-level storage modules continue to increase in shipment volume, and products for industrial and robot scenarios have entered the small-batch verification stage; Biwin Storage's revenue from AI emerging end-side storage products increased by 496% year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, and it has laid out low-power and high-bandwidth storage solutions for physical AI terminals in advance.

More critically, the explosion of storage demand for humanoid robots will further strengthen the logic of domestic storage substitution. The demand for independent and controllable supply chain of the global humanoid robot industry is much higher than that of ordinary consumer electronics. Domestic robot enterprises cannot rely on the quota guarantee of overseas storage vendors to support their mass production progress for a long time, and the opportunity window for domestic storage vendors such as YMTC and CXMT is opening rapidly.