CITIC Securities: Amid the AI financing boom, what signals do CDS spreads reveal?

CITIC Securities released a research report stating that the scale of AI capital expenditure continues to increase, the financing costs of related entities are rising, and combined with changes in the macroeconomic environment in the third quarter, this has driven investors' attention to the credit risk of AI technology companies and their hedging demand to rise simultaneously, leading the credit default swap market for AI technology companies to show a trend of both trading volume and spreads rising. Although changes in market sentiment have pushed CDS spreads of related companies to widen broadly, this has not yet evolved into a comprehensive industry-wide rise in credit risk, and the CDS spreads of major AI-related companies show gradient differentiation. Against the backdrop of AI infrastructure construction and bond financing still being in an expansion phase, the cross-sectional differentiation of CDS spreads and their dynamic evolution may become important indicators for observing the accumulation and transmission of credit risk in this round of the AI capital expenditure cycle.