Japan Tech hardware "Asia investor visit" Yasui

Research evidence excerpt

Japan Tech hardware "Asia investor visit" Yasui

Global Research

13 July 2026ab

Japan Tech hardware Equities

JapanAsia investor visit

Technology

Kenji Yasui

Concern over AI-related stocks could be due to Chinese models Analyst

We visited Hong Kong and Singapore (6-10 July). Since mid-June, share prices of AI- kenji.yasui@ubs.com

related names have begun to weaken, prompting much discussion about the cause. A +81-3-5208 6211

major potential factor is that US firms have started using Chinese models whose token

pricing is 1/50-1/100 that of frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI, raising

concerns that a US recovery of GPU investment could slow. Meanwhile, some investors’

concerns that Meta has surplus computing resources are likely to recede after

Bloomberg’s interview with CEO Mark Zuckerberg (link). Shortages of power

infrastructure were already a concern, and there was little sense that this issue has

intensified.

Maintaining AI-related stock recommendations

We maintain our bullish recommendations on Kioxia, Tokyo Electron, and SoftBank,

which are representative AI-related stocks. Even if Chinese models were to gain

prominence, we believe the likelihood of a significant decline in AI-related demand is

low for the following reasons: 1) inference computing consumes large amounts of

memory in both Chinese and US models; 2) China has limited computing resources in

the first place, and we think AI users are likely to eventually return to US models; and 3)

governments in various countries could potentially impose restrictions on the use of

Chinese models. To confirm these positives, we intend to monitor whether Anthropic

and OpenAI maintain monthly ARR growth momentum, comments from the CEOs of