Forget gravity
Asia opens this morning riding shotgun on the AI boom train that roared through Wall Street overnight. Amazon’s $38 billion partnership with OpenAI sent yet another electric charge through the megacap complex — a jolt so powerful it lit up the global screens before Tokyo even reopened from its long weekend.
The market now behaves like a crowd staring only at the right tail — eyes fixed on glory, blind to gravity. Nvidia, once the undisputed locomotive of the AI trade, now looks almost “poor” beside Asia’s own high-flyers: SK Hynix, Advantest, Samsung Electronics — each outpacing the U.S. torchbearer by a wide YTD margin. When the benchmark’s benchmark starts looking pedestrian, you know the fever has spread.
In Japan, the mighty Nikkei has long since left the atmosphere. It’s been in full upside panic mode, climbing beyond any reasonable trend channel. The RSI has lived in overbought territory for weeks, but nobody cares — because in mania mode, technicals are like speed limits on the Autobahn: advisory at best.
Even after the tariff-induced swoon in April, global equities have tacked on $17 trillion in market value, with the rally increasingly bottlenecked into the same handful of tech titans. It’s as if the entire market has narrowed to a single crowded corridor, the walls lined with AI logos and venture dreams. Amazon’s move simply adds another rocket to the booster stack — and traders are cheering the ignition, not asking how much fuel remains.
For the optimists, this is the moment when history rewrites itself — when valuations don’t matter because the future has been repriced. For the realists, it’s déjà vu of every liquidity-drenched cycle that came before it. The street whispers of “broader-market consolidation” sound polite; what they really mean is that everything not stamped with an AI label risks being roadkill.
Yet as the confetti fell, Fed Governor Lisa Cook slipped in a small, well-timed grenade: “Risks to financial stability are under every rock.” That wasn’t just an academic warning — it was a nod to the growing short-term liquidity tightness driving cash rates higher. It’s as if the Fed’s plumbing is humming louder while the trading floor dances to the AI drumbeat.
And then there’s Palantir — the poster child for the new exuberance. It smashed estimates, rallied after hours, and then promptly faded as traders blinked and remembered that even the most “visionary” stock eventually faces the same question: how much is too much?
For now, Asia’s traders will take the baton from New York and run with it. The AI parade rolls on, the Nikkei floats above its own reflection, and the tape feels like a festival of momentum masquerading as a market. Gravity hasn’t vanished — it’s merely waiting, patient and unseen, beneath the clouds of euphoria.
