Friday's confirmed Nikkei close of 64,611.15 is still the number on the board — Tokyo doesn't trade again until Monday — but the setup into that reopen shifted twice overnight. Goldman Sachs raised its 12-month TOPIX target, China's biggest chipmaker debuts in Shanghai, and the Middle East's oil shock cooled without resolving. None of it moves a Japanese share price before 9:00 Monday, but all of it is already sitting in the order books.
Goldman Sachs raised its 12-month TOPIX target to 4,500, arguing that continued yen depreciation supports the earnings-conversion math for Japan's exporters even as it recently cut its own dollar-yen forecasts to ¥162 in three months, ¥163 in six and ¥165 in twelve, up from ¥160/158/155, per Investing.com. The bank's case rests on higher-for-longer US yields and only gradual BOJ hikes keeping the currency under pressure — the same dynamic Friday's confirmed ¥163.76 close and the BOJ's own upcoming meeting will test directly.
ChangXin Memory Technologies, China's largest DRAM maker, begins trading in Shanghai on Monday after raising 57.92 billion yuan ($8.6 billion) in Asia's biggest IPO of 2026, pricing 6.69 billion shares at 8.66 yuan each, per Yahoo Finance. CXMT holds roughly 7.7% of global DRAM share and is central to Beijing's push for chip self-sufficiency — a new, well-funded competitor is exactly the kind of headline that has moved Kioxia and the broader Japan memory complex on sentiment alone all month, regardless of what CXMT's own numbers say.
The FOMC meets Tuesday and Wednesday with a decision due July 29, and the BOJ follows immediately with its own two-day meeting July 30-31 — the first time this year the two banks have decided back-to-back. USD/JPY closed Friday at a confirmed ¥163.76, its worst week since May, with Finance Minister Katayama's "decisive action" intervention warning still unactioned, per Investing.com. The BOJ is widely expected to hold at 1.0% while debating how much sooner the next hike needs to come, per Bloomberg.
Brent, which broke above $100 a barrel Thursday for the first time since the war began, has since pulled back and stabilized in the $89-$90 range, per Bloomberg — a real retreat from the peak, but still a roughly 40% climb for the month, and nowhere near where the BOJ's inflation assumptions sat when this week's meeting was first scheduled. The board now has to weigh that oil-driven channel alongside the weak-yen one on the same two days it decides policy.
SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said on stage in San Francisco that Anthropic has asked SK Hynix for chip supply to build its own custom silicon, calling it remarkable that an AI model developer now has chip ambitions of its own, per Fortune. SK Hynix already backed Anthropic's own May funding round alongside Samsung and Micron — another AI lab treating memory access as strategic infrastructure is one more data point for Kioxia and Tokyo Electron's own order books the next time HBM demand gets priced.
Canon reports Monday, Keyence, Nitto Denko and Japan Exchange Group follow Tuesday, then Komatsu, Hitachi, NEC, Advantest and Nomura Holdings all disclose Wednesday, with Japan Tobacco, Takeda, Oriental Land and Fujitsu closing out the week Thursday. Advantest's own record fiscal-2025 profit was ignored by the tape entirely last week — this is the first real test of whether the market that punished good numbers on sentiment contagion is ready to price them on their own merits again.
Japan's crude steel production has fallen to its lowest level in 56 years, with first-half 2026 output down 0.4% year-on-year to 40.40 million tonnes, as an influx of cheap Chinese steel imports continues to undercut domestic producers, per Nikkei Asia. It's a slow-burn structural story rather than a single-session mover, but it's the same China-oversupply dynamic that's shown up this year in solar panels, EVs and now memory chips — a pattern worth watching as CXMT adds fresh DRAM capacity Monday.
The US paused its nightly strikes on Iran for the first time in nearly two weeks after President Trump directed the military to stand down Friday, with Trump saying talks with Tehran were underway even as an Iranian official dismissed his claim that the country was "getting more serious" about a deal, per CNN. The pause landed the same day Houthi forces fired dozens of ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco facilities in Jizan and Yanbu — the first direct strike on a Saudi refinery complex in four years — with the Saudi-led coalition confirming its own strikes on Houthi positions in Hodeidah, per Bloomberg. Two fronts, moving in opposite directions, on the same weekend.
More than 300,000 people have now fled wildfires across southern France and Spain, with 167,000 evacuated in France's Gironde region alone and another 70,000 driven from villages west of Madrid, per France 24. The Gironde blaze has burned roughly 32,700 hectares this week — Madrid's regional president called the fire near the capital "the worst in local history" — and France has now deployed 1,500 soldiers alongside a military transport aircraft to reinforce the firefighting effort. The scale keeps building into a summer-tourism and insurance-cost story that outlasts any single news cycle.
DeepSeek suspended its second fundraising round Saturday, telling prospective investors it would not sign agreements in the coming days, after a leaked account of founder Liang Wenfeng's remarks at an earlier investor meeting — reportedly arguing the US-China AI gap comes down to computing power rather than talent — circulated widely through Chinese tech circles, per Bloomberg. The round had been pricing at a roughly $71 billion valuation, a 37% step-up from June's $52 billion close, in which Liang himself put in about $3 billion of his own money.
China's market regulator confiscated 1.66 billion yuan in illegal gains and fined Trip.com an additional 3.52 billion yuan — 5.2 billion yuan ($770 million) combined — for using exclusive-dealing terms and platform rules to stop hotels from setting their own prices or listing on rival platforms, per Yahoo Finance. It's the latest in Beijing's campaign against platform-driven price competition it blames for deflationary pressure — the same regulatory current that's already reshaped how Alibaba and Meituan operate domestically.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison personally guaranteed $40.4 billion of Paramount Skydance's roughly $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, backed by about 1.16 billion Oracle shares — but Oracle stock has fallen 34% this month and nearly halved since early June, cutting the real value of that guarantee by a similar margin, per The Globe and Mail. A coalition of 12 state attorneys general has separately sued to block the merger on antitrust grounds, and a federal judge issued a 14-day restraining order on July 20 halting the deal from closing.
Bitcoin was last confirmed at $64,197.12, down 1.9% from its prior print, per market_data.json, with stablecoin inflows weakening alongside it, per Investing.com. It's a quiet, low-conviction weekend for the asset relative to the volatility everywhere else in markets this week.
SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told an AI summit audience in San Francisco, sitting alongside Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, that Anthropic has formally asked SK Hynix for chip supply to build its own custom AI silicon rather than rely solely on third-party accelerators, per Fortune. SK Hynix already participated in Anthropic's May Series H round alongside Samsung and Micron, and Amodei has separately confirmed supply deals with both Korean memory makers — a model developer with its own chip ambitions is a new wrinkle in an AI infrastructure race that, until recently, was framed almost entirely around Nvidia.
A group of 25 companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and IBM signed a July 24 letter urging Washington not to restrict open-weight AI models — but OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet and Amazon were notably absent, with OpenAI adding its name only after the omission drew attention online, per Tom's Hardware. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously told Congress that open-source model scaling is "going down a very dangerous path," a stance critics — including a Trump administration adviser — say risks entrenching the largest labs by making it harder for smaller competitors to release models at all.
Qualcomm is reportedly preparing to raise processor prices before the end of summer, per Engadget, a move that would ripple through smartphone and device pricing heading into the fall product cycle. No specific magnitude has been disclosed yet.
Elon Musk's tunnel-infrastructure venture, The Boring Company, is reportedly in talks to raise new funding at a $20 billion valuation, per TechCrunch — a notable vote of investor confidence in a Musk-linked private venture in the same week Tesla and SpaceX both had rough public-market weeks.
Microsoft reports fiscal fourth-quarter results Wednesday, July 29, with the stock trading near a 1-year low ahead of the print, per The Motley Fool; Meta, down nearly 10% on the year, reports the same day, per Yahoo Finance. Both prints land the same day as the Fed's decision and one day before the BOJ's — a genuinely crowded Wednesday for anyone positioned across US mega-cap tech and Japanese rates simultaneously.
A Wall Street Journal piece making the rounds this week argues "corporate America has suddenly decided to stop blowing money on AI," while a separate Yahoo Finance feature frames Big Tech's AI bet as "starting to crack" — but Alphabet's own contracted-but-unrecognized spending commitments jumped to $811 billion in the same period, and Samsung, SK Group and Nvidia signed roughly $650 billion in new AI infrastructure deals last week alone. The stock-price story and the actual-spending story are telling two different accounts of the same cycle right now, and next week's Microsoft, Meta and Amazon earnings are the cleanest test yet of which one is right.
Shohei Ohtani skipped a scheduled bullpen session Saturday and won't throw off a mound again until his irritated left knee feels 100%, manager Dave Roberts said, after Ohtani reported "a little bit of regression" following his previous session Wednesday, per ESPN. Ohtani had already withdrawn from this month's All-Star Game over the same discomfort.
XG, the 7-member Japanese girl group whose Coachella set turned heads internationally this year, made its Fuji Rock Festival debut Saturday at Naeba, joining a 2026 lineup headlined by The xx, Khruangbin and Massive Attack, per Asahi Shimbun. A domestic act crossing over abroad and getting booked into Japan's biggest rock festival on the strength of it is exactly the kind of full-circle story the festival circuit loves.
Apple TV unveiled the first teaser for its long-in-development "Neuromancer" adaptation at San Diego Comic-Con, with Callum Turner starring as the cyberspace criminal at the center of William Gibson's foundational 1984 novel, per Variety. The novel effectively invented the term "cyberspace" decades before the internet looked anything like it does now.
Sony confirmed "God of War Laufey" will launch on PS5 February 16, 2027, following directly on from the newly announced next mainline entry in the franchise revealed at Comic-Con, per Engadget. Kratos isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Amazon's "The Rings of Power" showrunners previewed Season 3 at Comic-Con as "the season we've been building to," teasing a Gandalf who finally acts like Gandalf after two seasons of table-setting, per Gizmodo. After a mixed reception to the first two seasons, the goodwill on display at the panel was a notable shift in tone.
A Nintendo archivist visiting a Japanese love hotel found nearly every room still wired to a working Famicombox — Nintendo's rare 1986 commercial-only arcade unit, which was never sold to consumers and mostly survives only in hotels and lodgings from the era, per Kotaku. Working units are exceedingly rare, and the archivist declined to name the hotel to keep it from getting overrun. Some fans now think this exact kind of installation may be what started the decades-old "Nintendo love hotel" urban legend in the first place. Enjoy the week ahead.