1. Korea’s $880B AI infrastructure plan.

ASML, Applied Materials, and KLA, the chip-equipment suppliers that help manufacturers build advanced semiconductors advanced after South Korea lined up a monster AI infrastructure push. Samsung and SK Group plan to build four chip plants in Korea, feeding the market’s favorite new equation: more memory demand means more fabs, and more fabs means more tool orders.
Korea is targeting at least 1,350T won, or roughly $880B, across chips and data centers, including 800T won, or about $516B, for Samsung and SK chip plants.
The bull case is simple: AI memory demand is forcing Samsung and SK Hynix to spend, and the toolmakers sit upstream of that capex. Analysts are already chasing the move, with Susquehanna raising ASML’s target to €2,350.
The risk is just as obvious: if every memory maker builds at once, investors eventually stop saying “capacity expansion” and start whispering “oversupply.”
But ASML could become the first European trillion dollar company.

2. Europe has the most geographically diverse stock market.

Over half of revenues is generated in markets outside Developed Europe.

Source: JPMorgan

3. Japan offers attractive valuation and stability.

Japan’s equity market exhibits significantly lower concentration risk at the individual stock level than the US, Korea, and Taiwan. That said, the Tech sector is still ~20% of MSCI Japan, which provides meaningful exposure to AI and technology themes.

Further, Japan looks relatively attractive based on risk-adjusted EPS growth, while also offering attractive valuation and a level of equity volatility similar to the US – and well below the vol in Taiwan and Korea.

Yesterday, Citi upped its Nikkei 225 forecast to 90,000, implying a near 28% increase from its current level.

4. China robust factory activity.

China stocks were encouraged by robust factory activity data and President Xi Jinping reiterating a promise of "high-quality development", even as concerns remain over the economy's uneven growth.
China's manufacturing sector expanded for a seventh straight month in June, completing its strongest quarter since late 2020, a business survey showed on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, commercial verification, policy support, and supply-chain feedback point to faster Humanoid adoption in China. Indeed, more companies in China have announced mass production starting from late 2026.

Below: Estimates from Morgan Stanley

5. U.S.-based models lost volume share and are currently at 35% of token volume.

Chinese Deepseek is still the most popular.

The V4 Flash model is part of DeepSeek's open-weight AI collection, which is licensed under an open-source MIT license. This means the weights and code are publicly accessible for developers to download, modify, and integrate into their own systems.

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