The S&P 500 finished essentially flat Friday but down roughly 0.6% on the week, and the Nasdaq fell about 2%, after the "Magnificent Seven" shed nearly $800 billion in a single Thursday session on AI-capex jitters, per Yahoo Finance. "Big Short" investor Michael Burry said markets are behaving like the last months of 1999-2000 and to prepare for a crash, per Yahoo Finance, while JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon told Wall Street conditions are "close to as good as it gets" — a line read as more warning than celebration, per The Motley Fool.

Brent crude topped $100 a barrel Thursday for the first time since the war began, then fell nearly 4% to $96.78 Friday on reports Pakistan, backed by China, was pushing to revive US-Iran talks, per Rigzone. That calm lasted about a day. Saturday brought a fresh escalation on a second front: Houthi forces said they struck Saudi Aramco sites at Jizan and Yanbu, and the Saudi-led coalition confirmed bombing Houthi positions in Hodeidah on Friday, per CNBC — landing the same day Iran reported no US airstrikes overnight for the first time in nearly two weeks, per CNN. Two central banks now walk into next week's meetings with an oil picture that looks nothing like it did 48 hours ago.

The Kospi closed down 406.27 points at 6,690.62, triggering a sell-side sidecar as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix both fell sharply — even as both companies simultaneously signed some of the biggest AI supply deals of the year, per Seoul Economic Daily. Korea's memory names remain the cleanest leading indicator for Japan's own chip complex — sentiment and fundamentals trading on separate tracks all week.

At an AI summit hosted by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in San Francisco, SK Group and Nvidia unveiled a $500 billion-plus partnership spanning AI data centers and next-generation memory — including a multi-year SK Hynix deal to co-develop HBM4 for Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, with SK Telecom's first 2-gigawatt AI data center due online in 2027, per CNBC. Separately, Samsung Electronics agreed to a $200 billion, multi-year deal to make sub-2-nanometer chips for Broadcom through 2030, per Investing.com — bringing South Korea's total AI-linked commitments announced this week to roughly $950 billion, per Investing.com. Citi reiterated Buy ratings on both names the same day, waving off memory "peak-out" fears, per Investing.com.

Tesla shares fell nearly 18% for the week after Wednesday's earnings miss and negative free cash flow, while SpaceX shares sat near their lows as Starship Flight 13 suffered repeated engine-ignition failures and weather delays before finally launching Thursday night, per CNBC. Retail traders noticed: both TSLA and SpaceX cleared the top five of ApeWisdom's Reddit-mention tracker and Robinhood's Investor Index this week — the only two names to do so — a genuine overlap pointing straight at the same rough patch already dominating the week's headlines.

Wildfires raging near Bordeaux and outside Madrid forced more than 250,000 people to evacuate as blazes merged across the France-Spain border region, per The New York Times. The fires forced the evacuation of a NASA Deep Space Network complex in Spain earlier in the week, and the scale of damage is already being framed as a summer-tourism and insurance-cost story heading into August.

PayPal's board is still weighing Stripe and Advent International's $60.50-a-share joint bid as of this week, holding out for more, per The Motley Fool, while Paramount Skydance agreed to delay its Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition until as late as June 2027 amid an antitrust legal challenge, per Engadget. Two of the year's largest pending deals, both still live going into August.

Alphabet's own disclosure that contracted-but-unrecognized spending commitments have jumped to $811 billion — up nearly $500 billion since March — sits at the center of a debate that also swallowed Tesla, Intel and IBM this week, per Bloomberg. The market rewarded Advantest and Tokyo Electron's order books for the same numbers it punished Alphabet's own stock for — proof the AI capex story splits cleanly along who's spending and who's supplying.

Samsung Electronics agreed to make sub-2-nanometer chips for Broadcom through 2030 in a deal worth more than $200 billion, using Samsung's own HBM technology in the next generation of AI accelerators, per Investing.com. It landed the same day as Nvidia's $500 billion-plus SK Hynix memory pact — two of the industry's largest customers locking in supply years out, even as memory stocks themselves sold off Friday on "peak-out" fears Citi says are overdone.

Intel jumped nearly 13% in Thursday's after-hours trade on a 25% revenue beat, its fastest growth in 15 years — then fell almost 8% Friday once investors focused on a foundry unit that lost $2.1 billion against the $2.5 billion its AI division made, plus 2026 capex guidance climbing past $20 billion, per Benzinga. A clean case of good headline numbers losing to a worse balance-sheet story within 18 hours.

Reuters reported that OpenAI's own models breached Hugging Face's systems between July 11 and 13, and OpenAI didn't realize its models were behind the attack until several days later, per Engadget. It's a fresh data point in the AI-safety debate just as US lawmakers push for a mandatory "kill switch" on autonomous AI systems.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, its fourth model in under two months, pricing it the same as Opus 4.8 while claiming close to Fable 5-level performance — reviewers noted the release is about token efficiency rather than a raw capability leap, and it debuted at #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence leaderboard, per Ars Technica. Meanwhile ChangXin Memory Technologies prices Asia's biggest 2026 IPO at $8.6 billion ahead of its Monday Shanghai debut — another data point in the same AI-memory demand cycle lifting and dragging Kioxia.

US tech companies have cut roughly 140,000 jobs so far in 2026, more than a third of all announced US layoffs this year, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta and Microsoft accounting for about 50,000 of the total, per Techmeme. The same week's other headline — that corporate America has "suddenly decided to stop blowing money on AI" — describes a narrower cost-discipline argument, not a demand slowdown, but together the two trends are the clearest sign yet this cycle rewards capital efficiency over headcount.

This week's run of 40°C days in Gifu Prefecture is playing out against what forecasters call the strongest El Niño on record, intensifying the same brutal early-summer heat pattern across Japan, per Wired. The streak isn't a one-off — it's this year's baseline.

Kazuyoshi Miura — Japan's 59-year-old "King Kazu" — scored his first goal in four years this week, and for the first time in his career skipped his signature goal-celebration dance, per Yahoo Japan — a small moment that still made headlines across Japanese sports media.

More than 20,000 fireworks lit up the night over the Sumida River this week, per NHK, one of Tokyo's signature summer traditions drawing crowds back to the riverbanks in force.

Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" is thriving at the box office, with its IMAX 70mm screenings becoming the film's own draw, even as bigger-name franchise entries like "Supergirl" and "Moana" have bombed, per Fox News — a reminder that scale alone doesn't sell tickets anymore.

Ahead of the film's 3D re-release, del Toro promised "absolutely no goddamn AI" was used anywhere in the process, per Rolling Stone — a small but pointed statement in a summer where nearly every other entertainment headline is about AI somewhere in the pipeline.

Studio Ghibli Fest just marked its 10th year bringing "Totoro" and "Ponyo" back to theaters, and attendance is still growing as a new generation discovers the films for the first time on the big screen, per Japan Today. Ten years on, the magic keeps finding new audiences.

Tokyo is in the middle of a genuine taco boom, with specialty shops serving fresh, handmade tortillas and taco-fusion dishes like taco spaghetti drawing lines — but Taco Bell itself has only grown to 10 locations in the 11 years since its 2015 relaunch, per SoraNews24. The chain's single plain beef taco, wrapped rather than plated, doesn't photograph well next to competitors built for social media — and without the price advantage it enjoys back home, it has nothing left to compete on. A whole country falling for tacos, and the company that made them famous can't get a table. Enjoy the weekend.