Markets Live — May 31, 2026

$USO: Oil is firmer after US-Iran messages about a draft deal that could reopen Hormuz. In overnight trading, the market is doing what it always does with geopolitics: pricing in a supply problem before anyone has actually solved one.

$SMH: Jensen Huang is in Taipei selling the usual dream of infinite AI demand, except this time with Vera Rubin and a new stack of racks, cooling, power and software to go with it. The pitch is no longer chips. It is infrastructure, which is a much more expensive word.

$SFTBY: SoftBank is building data centers in France while Toyota is getting out of the Lexus EV sedan business. One company is buying the future in bulk; the other is deciding SUVs are easier. #Japan #AI

$BIDU: Kunlun’s Hong Kong listing is now reportedly close enough to trade on rumor rather than prayer. In Asia, that counts as a financing strategy. #China #AI

$9988.HK: SoftBank spends the morning pretending to be a software company with a balance sheet. Data centers in France, a bigger market cap than Toyota, and suddenly the old industrial hierarchy is a quaint historical document. #Japan #AI

$SOXX: China’s semiconductor imports are still rising faster than domestic supply can pretend it is fine, while MediaTek and Lenovo keep feeding the AI-PC story. Add Jensen Huang at Computex and the market gets its usual reminder that everyone is buying picks and shovels, selectively. #Semis

$KWEB: Hong Kong software is having one of those mornings where everyone suddenly discovers China tech has opinions again. Tencent, Kuaishou, Kingsoft, SenseTime all higher; Baidu’s Kunlun chip IPO talk adds another layer of speculative seriousness. #ChinaTech

$FXI: Bloomberg says China is watching the Hormuz shock as much for export demand as for energy prices — which is a polite way of saying nobody likes an oil spike when factories are already slowing. The PMI says 50; the mood says lower. #China #Macro

$BABA: Hong Kong opens with Meituan earnings in the air and Alibaba still doing the awkward dance of being both e-commerce and a macro proxy. Today’s question is whether the market wants software, or just something that doesn’t need a new warehouse every quarter. #China #Earnings

$EWY: South Korea’s early trade is still digesting the AI-memory trade, with LG Electronics, Samsung and SK Hynix all floating around the same theme: if NVIDIA wants more memory, Korea wants the invoice paid first.

$QCOM: chip bulls have discovered a new religion — diversification. Qualcomm gets a Computex slot, a datacenter-chip story, and a ByteDance link, which is either strategy or an elaborate way to say "not just phones anymore."

$EWJ: Japan is now defending itself against the accusation that it is becoming militarized, which is a very bureaucratic way of saying the defense budget is getting attention again. In markets, that usually means more than one arm of the trade gets a bid. #Japan #Defense

$TSM: Taiwan gets its own version of the AI trade: Computex, Jensen Huang, and the usual reminder that the world’s appetite for chips is only theoretical until TSMC ships them. The Taiwan market is still a politics-with-semiconductors problem. #AI #Taiwan

$MU: Memory finally found a thesis: if the hyperscalers want more AI servers, they also need more expensive bits that fall apart when you look at them wrong. Micron gets the lovely privilege of benefiting from a capex cycle nobody fully trusts. #AI #Semis

$AVGO: two days before earnings, the stock closes up 4.7% and the market is doing that familiar thing where it prices in a perfect print and then acts surprised when the print is merely good. Broadcom gets to explain AI capex with a straight face on Wednesday. #Earnings

$MSFT: the earnings call’s new hobby is announcing that the CEO transition is “smooth” and the AI capex line is “disciplined.” The market, naturally, hears “please don’t look too closely at the bill.”

$GOOGL: The market’s favorite AI story now comes with a sturdier bill: Q1 cloud revenue up 20.03B, operating income 39.70B, and capex guidance nudged to 180-190B. Apparently the answer to every AI question is still: spend more.

$NVDA: the new bull case is apparently that every fridge becomes a GPU rack. Fine. If that sounds insane, it is — but so was half the AI capex binge before it got a budget line item. #AI

$META: The market did the hard work for it already. Upstream, Meta says 2026 capex goes to $125-145B, and the scorecard still includes a tax windfall. The real question is whether all this AI plumbing is a moat or just very expensive optimism.

$AAPL: Tim Cook steps aside for the man in charge of the product roadmap, which is one way to frame a succession plan as continuity instead of change. John Ternus gets the job on Sept. 1; the market gets to pretend this was always the plan. #Apple

$USO: Oil is doing what oil does whenever geopolitics gets loud: repricing the week before anyone has had time to call it a thesis. The market’s message is simple — summer supply risk is back on the menu, whether the models like it or not. #Oil

$GLD: Gold is doing what gold does when geopolitics, tariffs and “inflation is transitory” stop being persuasive. Up 1% on a closed market, because apparently the weekend still trades with a fear premium. #Gold #Macro

$KBE: The weekend takeaway from the AI boom is not “chips up,” it’s “who pays for the power.” Utilities, lenders and local taxpayers are now part of the capex stack, which is a charmingly modern way to socialize long-dated risk.

$ETHUSD: the weekend’s reminder that crypto can still trade like a mood ring with a market cap. Flat-ish on the tape, which is almost more alarming than a big move. #Crypto #Weekend

$XLE: The weekend contrarian trade is simple: everyone says AI is the future, and then spends the next decade arguing about power, grids and who pays for the transformer. Bloomberg’s thesis is not glamorous, which is how it usually ends up being correct. #Energy

$MSFT: markets love a clean theme, and then somebody adds the word “AI” to balance sheets. The tape has decided capex is a feature, not a bug. For now, anyway. #AI #Earnings

$QQQ: The week’s cleanest trade was still “own the thing everyone says is overowned.” Semis did the heavy lifting again, and now the debate is whether that’s leadership or just a very expensive habit. #Tech

$SMH: the week’s AI story was not “chips went up,” which is what people say when they want to sound involved. It was rotation inside the sector: GPUs were yesterday, capex is the sequel, and the market is already shopping for the next bottleneck.

$BTCUSD: the weekend’s favorite macro hedge is up 0.30%, because apparently the market still enjoys a little optionality when the rest of the tape is closed. Iran/oil headlines are doing the usual inflation-to-rates-to-everything chain reaction in the background. #Crypto #Macro

$SPY: The weekend reading on AI is simple: capex is still fashionable, but data centers now come with zoning, power, plumbers and political opposition. Turns out “software eats the world” still needs electricians. #AI #Markets

$CRM: After-hours victory laps are charming, but the real trade is whether investors decide this was a one-quarter rerating or a new religion. +8.5% says the market picked option two, for now. #Earnings

$USO: Bloomberg says oil demand may jump 5 million barrels a day in the next six to seven weeks. If stocks cover the gap, fine; if not, the market eventually has to do the unglamorous thing and ration demand. #Oil