US stocks slipped Thursday as Treasury yields rose and oil prices firmed, with investors weighing a fresh batch of earnings against Friday's jobs report, according to Yahoo Finance and CNBC. The pullback followed a run of individually brutal earnings reactions — Honeywell Aerospace, AppLovin and Datadog all fell sharply despite mixed-to-strong underlying results — that kept index-level moves modest even as the stock-picking beneath them stayed violent. For Tokyo, a soft but not panicked Wall Street tape is a more manageable overnight backdrop than Wednesday's swing, but it does nothing to settle the AI-earnings-bar dynamic that hit the region's chip names hard on Thursday.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases July's non-farm payrolls tonight at 21:30 JST, with Wall Street consensus looking for a gain of roughly 83,000 jobs and an unemployment rate holding near 4.2%, according to CNBC. The report arrives with extra weight after ADP's private-payrolls count came in at just 44,000 for July — the smallest gain since January and roughly half of June's revised number — a miss sharp enough to put variable-rate borrowers and Fed-watchers on alert, according to Tech Times. A soft official print tonight would revive Fed rate-cut speculation and could pressure the dollar broadly — a dynamic Tokyo will be watching directly through USD/JPY into next week, given how much of this year's yen weakness has tracked the US-Japan rate gap.

Honeywell Aerospace — spun off from Honeywell as an independent company only in late June — fell as much as 24% Thursday to a fresh 52-week low after missing second-quarter estimates and cutting its full-year outlook, citing supply-chain constraints that limited output during the quarter, according to MarketWatch. The company now expects full-year organic sales growth of just 4-5%, down from a prior 7-9% target, and cut its adjusted EBITDA range by roughly $300 million at the midpoint. It's a rough debut quarter for a newly independent aerospace supplier, and worth watching for Tokyo given how tightly Japan's own aerospace-parts makers sit inside the same global supply chains currently running short.

AppLovin shares fell nearly 20% Thursday to their lowest level in over a year after second-quarter revenue of $1.92 billion came in just under the $1.95 billion Wall Street expected, with third-quarter guidance also landing short of consensus, according to MarketWatch. CEO Adam Foroughi attributed the miss to timing on improvements to the company's AI ad-placement models as it pushes further into e-commerce advertising, and Bank of America cut its price target on the stock by nearly 40% while keeping a buy rating. It's the same pattern that's defined this earnings season on both sides of the Pacific this week: strong AI-adjacent growth still isn't enough when the bar has been set for acceleration, not just growth.

Alphabet returned to the bond market for the third time since late last year, seeking up to $25 billion across as many as ten tranches to help fund its AI infrastructure spending, according to MarketWatch. The offering drew roughly $115 billion in peak investor demand — more than four times its size — according to Yahoo Finance, even as Alphabet posted negative free cash flow for the first time in its history this year and has twice raised its 2026 capex forecast, most recently to a $195-205 billion range. For Tokyo, debt-financed hyperscaler capex on this scale is the demand signal sitting directly upstream of Japan's own chip-equipment and memory names, whatever the week-to-week volatility in how that trade is being priced.

Copper prices set a fresh record above $14,000 a ton this week as US stockpiling — more than 200,000 tons arrived at American ports in July alone, the largest monthly inflow on record — tightens supply everywhere else ahead of a still-undecided Trump administration tariff ruling on refined copper imports, according to CNBC. The rally is a genuine cost headwind for Japan's copper-consuming manufacturers and a tailwind for its trading houses' commodities desks, and another data point in a summer where tariff positioning has been moving industrial-metal prices as much as actual industrial demand.

Brent crude's three-session slide paused Thursday after reports that the emerging US-brokered shipping arrangement through the Strait of Hormuz would still bar US vessels from the route, a wrinkle that complicates the cleaner de-escalation narrative markets had been pricing in, according to Investing.com. For Japan — which imports the overwhelming majority of its crude through Hormuz — a real reopening remains the more important outcome than any single day's price move, but a deal that carves out US shipping is a reminder that the underlying conflict is still being negotiated in pieces rather than resolved outright.

Michael Burry warned in a Tuesday Substack post that current conditions — thin liquidity, leverage stacked behind momentum, and mechanical strategies that amplify moves in both directions — echo the setup before 1987's Black Monday crash, even as the S&P 500 keeps notching fresh records, according to CNBC. He's kept short positions on Nvidia, Tesla, Palantir and other AI-exposed names in place rather than covering into the rally, a bet that the market's own momentum eventually becomes the risk rather than the reward. It's a contrarian voice worth flagging for Tokyo precisely because Japan's own chip and AI names have spent this week trading as a leveraged, high-beta proxy for the same US AI trade Burry is betting against — if he's right, the region that rallied hardest on the way up has the most room to fall on the way down.

SpaceX shares held up through Thursday's first wave of post-IPO insider selling as its early-investor lockup period expired, and options flow shifted notably bullish in the process — of $600 million in premium traded by midday, the dominant position was selling puts rather than buying calls, a trade that reflects a bet on the stock stabilizing rather than staging a rapid rebound, according to CNBC. Separately, Tesla and SpaceX said they'll jointly invest $16.8 billion in a new "Terafab" chip plant in Texas, according to TechCrunch. Between the options positioning and the fresh chip-manufacturing commitment, Thursday was the first day in over a week that SpaceX's post-earnings selloff looked like it might be finding a floor — a name Tokyo's own AI-adjacent complex has been trading in sympathy with all week.

Datadog fell as much as 17% Thursday despite second-quarter revenue climbing 36% to $1.12 billion and a raised full-year guide, after disclosing that its largest customer — a nine-figure AI account spanning 17 products — told the company it's cutting usage starting in the third quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal, via Techmeme. The math behind the stock reaction: fourth-quarter growth now implies roughly 25%, down from 36% in the quarter just reported. It's a sharper, more specific version of the same worry that's been trailing the entire AI-infrastructure trade all week — not whether the spending is real, but whether any single vendor's slice of it can be relied on to keep accelerating, a question with direct read-through for Japan's own AI-supply-chain names.

Nvidia is considering shipping versions of its upcoming Rubin Ultra GPU with less memory than originally planned, after running into difficulty securing enough high-bandwidth memory, and has tested at least three configurations, according to The Information, via Techmeme. HBM — the stacked DRAM that only SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron currently produce at scale — has been the single tightest link in the AI hardware chain all year, and a supply constraint serious enough to affect Nvidia's flagship next-generation part is a strong signal of just how binding that bottleneck has become. It's also a direct line back to Tokyo's own chip-equipment makers: whichever HBM producer wins the incremental Rubin Ultra volume, the tooling behind it runs through the same Advantest and Tokyo Electron supply chain that's been whipsawed by this week's Korea-Japan memory selloff.

Western Digital shares fell more than 10% Thursday after issuing fiscal first-quarter guidance — $4.1 billion in revenue and $4.00 in non-GAAP earnings per share at the midpoint — that landed short of what rival Seagate had signaled for the same period, even though Western Digital's own fourth-quarter revenue rose 44% year-on-year to $3.75 billion, ahead of the $3.7 billion analysts expected, according to Barron's, via Techmeme. It's the same guidance-over-results pattern that hit Sandisk on the very same earnings call cycle this week, and a reminder that in this storage and memory upcycle, a beaten-and-raised quarter is no longer enough on its own — the forward number is what's actually moving these stocks.

AMD shares declined Thursday as investors pushed back on the pace of the company's AI-chip returns even as the broader data-center growth story stays intact, according to Yahoo Finance. The move sits inside the same week AMD's own gaming segment has shrunk to roughly 6% of total revenue as the company leans almost entirely into AI and data-center chips — a concentration that cuts both ways: more upside if the AI buildout keeps accelerating, more downside on any single quarter that merely meets rather than beats.

Demis Hassabis's move from Google DeepMind CEO to DeepMind chairman and Alphabet chief scientist had been building for roughly a year, with Hassabis reportedly more drawn to hands-on scientific work than day-to-day executive duties, according to Semafor. The bigger consequence is geographic: Hassabis was the only person overseeing a US tech giant's AI development from outside the United States, and Google is now consolidating its AI leadership in California after losing several senior engineers, according to Bloomberg. DeepMind started as a small London lab before Google acquired it in 2014, and its rise was one of the UK's strongest arguments that it could stay relevant in a race increasingly dominated by Silicon Valley and Beijing — an argument that got measurably weaker this week.

Shueisha launched Manga Million, a new digital platform offering more than 1 million pages from 400 titles — including One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen — translated into over 100 languages, free to read without registration for a limited time, according to Anime News Network. Editor-in-chief Shuhei Hosono said the project grew out of a simple question for the publisher's 100th anniversary: what if Shueisha translated a million pages of manga into a hundred languages, to knock down the language barrier that's kept so many readers from ever getting to the source material. It lands just two days after Weekly Shonen Jump's print circulation fell below a million copies for the first time — less a coincidence than the industry's own house making its bet on where the next hundred years of readers are actually going to show up.

Adam Sandler confirmed that production has started on "Grown Ups 3," reuniting with Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, David Spade and Salma Hayek for the long-awaited follow-up, posting "we missed you" alongside the announcement, according to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. The first set photo shows the full ensemble back together, a comfort-franchise reunion landing at a moment when comedy sequels with this much built-in nostalgia have become one of the more dependable bets in an otherwise unpredictable streaming slate.

Japan's nine-day Obon travel period begins Saturday just as Typhoon No. 13 bears down on Okinawa and a second storm tracks toward the northern Pacific coast early next week, with ANA and JAL already canceling roughly 100 flights and an estimated 75,000 travelers facing disruption, according to News On Japan. One hotel operator said half its bookings for the weekend had already been canceled — an early, real-time look at how much of the country's single biggest domestic-travel window can turn on a storm track that's still finalizing itself.

Starbucks Japan is releasing a collaboration collection with Traveler's Company, the Kobe-based stationery maker known for its leather-bound Traveler's Notebook system, blending the coffee chain's seasonal-drop culture with a brand whose notebooks and accessories have their own devoted following among Japan's stationery enthusiasts, according to SoraNews24. It's a pairing that makes more sense than it sounds — both brands built their following on the same ritual of small, well-made objects people return to daily, just from opposite ends of the counter.

Lawson has begun rolling out robot-operated kitchens — TechMagic's I-Robo 2 system — across a handful of Tokyo and Kanagawa stores, and the latest addition to the machine's repertoire is a fresh-cooked yakisoba with pork, carrots and cabbage, stir-fried to order in 90 to 150 seconds at temperatures above 300°C, according to SoraNews24. Customers order from an in-store terminal or by phone, staff load the ingredients, and the robot handles the rest — one of 13 dishes the machine can now turn out, priced from 499 to 1,099 yen, with two more store rollouts already scheduled for later this month. It's a small, slightly absurd, entirely Japanese image to end the week on: a country famous for konbini efficiency now has a robot arm working the wok, and it's already cheaper than most people's lunch.