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Morning Edition · Wednesday, October 28, 2026Published at 1:14 AM EDT · New York
Anthropic's Listing Plan Lifts Asian Tech Stocks While China's State Funds Buy Shares to Halt a 20% Slide
SK Hynix beat profit forecasts and pledged to return $75 billion to investors this year, while Chinese stocks fell in Tuesday's final hour when expected state buying did not appear.
Asian stock markets rose on Wednesday after gains on Wall Street, as investors kept buying shares tied to artificial intelligence (AI), Al Jazeera reported. The latest trigger was Anthropic's public filing for an initial public offering on October 26. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT and could begin trading as soon as November 16, CNN reported. Fortune reported that the filing lifted stocks across Asia, with China the exception.
Memory-chip makers are the clearest beneficiaries of AI spending. SK Hynix reported better-than-expected quarterly operating profit and said it will return $75 billion to investors this year, the Financial Times reported.
China is moving the other way. The CSI 300 index entered a bear market after a record 10-week losing streak and fell roughly 20% from its June peak, Invezz reported. State-linked funds and brokers, known as the "national team", are buying shares as investors leave the AI trade, the Financial Times reported. Exchange-traded funds that the national team uses drew 128.7 billion yuan, about $19 billion, last week, the largest inflows since the trade-war sell-off, according to Bloomberg. On Tuesday Chinese stocks fell in the final hour after that buying failed to appear, Bloomberg reported.
Some investors are buying protection against the AI rally. A MarketWatch column argued that a prominent Silicon Valley promoter of AI had set out the reasons to worry about a bubble in equity prices. The Economist reported that credit default swaps are back in demand as investors hedge AI-related debt.
Part of a tracked trend
AI Spending Meets Funding Limits
As AI capital spending shifts from internal cash flow to debt and private funding, each new spending increase will be answered with lower supplier valuations and higher financing costs until spending growth slows to what measured returns can support.
What this means
Two forms of price support are operating side by side. In the US and Korea, private capital is moving toward AI listings and chip suppliers. In China, state money is buying index funds to stop a decline that private investors are not stopping. Both weaken price signals. A large new AI listing adds share supply that must be funded by selling something else, often existing technology holdings. Chinese indexes now depend on daily state flows, as Tuesday's late fall showed. The 2015 precedent is instructive. China's national team halted that summer's crash, but stocks fell again in January 2016 when new circuit breakers triggered and state buying slowed. The desk's read is that AI-linked Asian stocks stay supported into the Anthropic pricing in mid-November, because demand for allocation in a large listing tends to lift related shares beforehand. Chinese stocks keep falling sharply whenever state buying pauses until Beijing pairs the purchases with fiscal stimulus aimed at household income. This read is wrong if the listing is priced well below expectations or postponed, which would show that capital available for AI is reaching its limit.
What to watch
- The price range Anthropic sets in its amended filing, which will show how much capital investors will commit to AI at current valuations.
- Daily inflows into China's national-team index funds. A sustained slowdown without new stimulus would expose the CSI 300 to further declines.
- Prices of credit default swaps on large AI-related borrowers. A rise would show that debt investors, not just equity investors, are pricing a downturn in AI spending.
Observations to monitor, not financial advice.
Synthesized from: Al Jazeera · Financial Times World · Financial Times Technology · MarketWatch
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