Asia bought the chips, America's futures sold Nvidia

On Wednesday Wall Street had one of its better days. The S&P 500 rose 1.3% to 7,619 and the Nasdaq 100 2.3%, carried by an upbeat outlook from CoreWeave and talk of Anthropic’s oversubscribed IPO^2,3. Then, after the close, Nvidia shares fell as much as 10% on reports that its board was preparing to remove chief executive Jensen Huang^2,3. By Thursday morning in Asia, Nasdaq 100 futures were down 0.6% and S&P 500 futures 0.3%².

Asia did not follow. At the Tokyo midday break, AFP had the Kospi up 1.2% at 5,463.98, the Nikkei 225 up 0.8% at 61,714.16 and the Shanghai Composite up 0.4% at 3,694.28. Hong Kong was the exception, the Hang Seng down 1.1% at 24,043.69¹. The MSCI Asia Pacific index was up 0.3%, led by technology shares, according to Bloomberg².

Why the split. Asia’s chipmakers, among them SK hynix, Samsung, Kioxia and TSMC, have led the region’s rally, AFP reports¹. They sell memory, wafers and packaging to everyone building data centres, not to one chief executive. Bloomberg quoted Allspring’s Gary Tan as seeing “selective opportunities” among semiconductor firms that can offer “credible second source alternatives”². One supplier’s boardroom trouble is, for its competitors and its suppliers, a matter of order books.

The other weight. Rates. The dollar held near an 18-month high, with traders fully pricing a quarter-point Federal Reserve rise next month and a small chance of a half point². The yen was little changed at 159.82 per dollar². A tighter Fed is a slower, duller pressure than a boardroom drama, and it applies to every share at once.

For you. If you hold a world or technology fund, Thursday’s lesson is about concentration: a single company’s governance can move an index, while the businesses that sell to it keep invoicing. These are intraday snapshots, not closing levels. Nothing here is investment advice.