1. Asia is headed toward an industrial “Super-Cycle”, says Morgan Stanley.

“We believe Asia is entering its strongest industrial cycle since the mid-2000s, supported by AI and AI-related infrastructure, energy transition, defense capex, and spillovers into broader industrial investment. We expect Asia’s capex to grow at a 7% CAGR through 2030 (~3x the pace of the past three years) to a US$16trn annual run rate, with high-growth sectors expanding at a 16% CAGR and Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan best positioned to benefit, in our view.”

Below: Asia’s gross fixed investment to rise to $16 trillion by 2030

2. AI memory rally lifts Samsung into $1 trillion club.

"Due to the capex spend we are seeing from hyperscalers in the U.S., the earnings growth trajectory for sectors such as semiconductors, tech hardware, industrials and materials in Asia exceeds anything we have seen in a long-time," says Natixis Investment Managers.
"This capex is leading to material value creation in Asia as the provider of the picks and shovels to the AI ecosystem".

3. $25 Trillion global robot TAM by 2050.

And that is only for new robots... it excludes used robots, spare parts and service, finance and insurance.
The robot economy will bring forth a world full of autonomous machines in varying degrees of working condition... including billions of broken, damaged or otherwise 'ailing' robots. Keeping them up and running is going to be big business.

Below: Global New Robot Sales by Strata ($bn) – (Excluding parts and services)

4. US factory orders going strong.

Core capital goods orders (business investment proxy) jumped by 3.4%, the strongest gain since Jul'20.

5. “Meta spends more than it can afford.”

At around 18 times forward earnings, its valuation represents a discount to other big-tech companies.
Meta has arguably been the most successful big-tech company so far at using AI to juice ad sales, which account for nearly all its revenue.
The company has a huge base of users—more than 3.5 billion people used Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger daily in the first quarter. Growth, though, isn’t impressive.
And Meta, unlike its big-tech peers, has little to fall back on if that ad business reaches its limits. Meta doesn’t have a cloud-computing business like Amazon, Microsoft or Google that could provide another way to generate returns from AI or drive sales during a soft patch for ads. It doesn’t have Amazon’s e-commerce operation or Microsoft’s corporate-software franchise, either.
And the company is piling on debt in the AI model development race, weakening its balance sheet.

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