Meta description: Asian futures pointed higher Friday after Microsoft's record surge and strong Amazon earnings revived confidence in the AI trade following a brutal week for chip stocks. Here's the global wrap.
After one of the roughest weeks of the year for Asian tech stocks, Friday brought a genuinely different mood. Equity-index futures for Australia, Japan, and South Korea all pointed to gains as a powerful rebound in megacap US technology shares revived confidence in the AI trade that had looked shaky just days earlier.
The scale of Thursday's US rally set the tone
The overnight catalyst was unmistakable. The S&P 500 rose 1.7% and the Nasdaq 100 climbed 3.4% on Thursday, powered by Microsoft's historic 16% surge — a single-day gain of roughly $450 billion that we covered in detail in our companion post — alongside strong earnings from Amazon. That combination gave Asian markets a clear, positive signal to open Friday's session on, a sharp reversal from the anxiety that had gripped the region for much of the week.
A rough week that Friday's futures are trying to erase
The turnaround is especially notable given how bruising this week had been for Asian markets specifically. As covered in our earlier posts, South Korea's Kospi tumbled 10.84% on Tuesday alone, with Samsung Electronics falling 13.4% and SK Hynix dropping over 14.7% amid "circular financing" concerns tied to AI infrastructure deals. Japan's Nikkei 225 fell nearly 4% the same day, while Advantest — a key supplier to the chip industry — dropped more than 10%. Friday's positive futures represent a meaningful, if not yet complete, reversal of that damage.
Why Thursday's earnings mattered so much for Asia specifically
Much of this week's Asian selloff stemmed directly from doubts about AI infrastructure spending — the same doubts Microsoft and Amazon's results helped ease. As we noted in our post on the chip-sector rally, Amazon's management explicitly said both its AI and custom chip businesses were rapidly gaining momentum, a direct counterpoint to the circular-financing skepticism that had hammered Korean and Japanese chip suppliers earlier in the week. For markets whose largest companies are deeply embedded in the AI hardware supply chain, that kind of reassurance from major US customers carries outsized weight.
Not every signal points to smooth sailing
It's worth tempering the optimism with context. As covered in our post on the forced deleveraging at Situational Awareness, at least one major AI-focused hedge fund has been unwinding large positions tied to names like SK Hynix — a process that can continue creating volatility in the underlying stocks even as broader sentiment improves. Traders should be cautious about assuming Friday's positive futures guarantee a smooth session, given how much forced selling and rapid sentiment swings have characterized trading throughout this particular stretch.
What to watch today
- Whether South Korea's Kospi and Japan's Nikkei can recover meaningful ground after this week's sharp declines
- Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix specifically, as the clearest barometers of whether circular-financing concerns have genuinely eased
- Whether any residual selling from the Situational Awareness unwind continues to weigh on AI infrastructure names
- How US futures hold up heading into Friday's session, as a signal of whether Thursday's rally has real staying power
Bottom line
Friday's positive setup across Asian markets caps an unusually volatile week — one that saw the Kospi plunge more than 10% before US megacap earnings helped reverse the mood almost entirely by week's end. Whether this represents a genuine turning point for AI infrastructure sentiment, or just a sharp bounce within an ongoing volatile stretch, is likely to become clearer as next week's trading unfolds.
This post is based on reporting from Bloomberg and CNBC as of July 28-30, 2026. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
