Maersk's shares jumped 7% after the shipping giant's second-quarter EBITDA came in at $3 billion against a $2.12 billion forecast, prompting the company to raise its full-year EBITDA guidance to $10.5-12.5 billion from $8-10 billion — the second upgrade this year, according to CNBC. The turbulence driving those freight rates — the US-Iran standoff choking Hormuz traffic and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea — is the same turbulence keeping Japan's own import costs elevated; any normalization of those routes would cut the other way fast.

The Kospi gained 3.6% Thursday, extending its rally from a July 30 low to roughly 22% and crossing the 20% threshold that marks a technical bull market, with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each climbing nearly 5% or more on renewed confidence in AI infrastructure spending, according to CNBC. Korea's memory makers are the clearest read-through for Japan's own chip-equipment suppliers — when Samsung and SK Hynix run this hard on AI demand, it's typically a leading signal for order books at Tokyo Electron and Advantest.

Ukraine struck export terminals at the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, prompting Moscow to warn of "chaos" in global grain markets as the attack adds to a blockade that's already trapped Ukrainian farmers' harvest, according to CNBC and the South China Morning Post. Japan imports the bulk of its wheat, so a sustained Black Sea supply shock would show up directly in food-import costs, not just as a distant headline.

European equities extended Wednesday's Wall Street rally into Thursday's session as the in-line US CPI print further dampened expectations of any near-term Fed hike, according to Investing.com. It's the market's second day of leaning into a September hold, extending the same read-through that pushed the S&P 500 and Nasdaq toward record territory Wednesday. European bonds held broadly flat as traders digested the print alongside a mixed run of other data, according to Investing.com, and the same calmer-Fed read has kept 10-year Treasury yields anchored near their recent range rather than pushing higher.

Investors close to Anthropic are betting the AI lab could be valued above $2 trillion — with some eyeing closer to $3 trillion — if it lists as soon as October, a figure that would eclipse SpaceX's debut as the largest IPO ever completed, according to the Financial Times. The math leans on annualized revenue climbing to $100-120 billion by year-end from the $47 billion Anthropic disclosed in May — a scale of AI-driven growth that continues to set the pace for how the whole sector, Tokyo's chip-equipment names included, gets priced.

Brent crude, last confirmed at $88.37 a barrel, has eased further as traders weigh softer demand forecasts against the ongoing US-Iran deadlock over the strait, according to Investing.com. For now the demand-side worry is winning out over the supply-side risk, a tug-of-war that's kept crude range-bound even as the Hormuz standoff itself hasn't budged.

Cisco reported record fiscal 2026 revenue of $63.3 billion, up 12% year-on-year, with hyperscale AI infrastructure orders reaching $9.3 billion for the year — about 4.5 times the prior year's total — and guided fiscal 2027 revenue to $72.2-73.4 billion including $7.5 billion of AI-related sales, according to Investing.com. It's another networking-layer confirmation of the same AI-buildout cycle Japan's chip-equipment makers have been trading off all year.

Lenovo posted an all-time quarterly high of $26.9 billion in revenue, up 43% year-on-year and the fastest growth pace in 5 years, with AI-related revenue up 60% to $9.3 billion — 35% of the total — and shares hitting a record high on the print, according to Reuters via Investing.com. Adjusted net income more than doubled to $1.1 billion, crossing the billion-dollar mark for the first time.

Tencent's second-quarter revenue rose 11% to 204.8 billion yuan, beating estimates, but net profit of 56 billion yuan missed forecasts as capital expenditure surged 65% quarter-on-quarter to fund AI infrastructure, with operating cash flow swinging negative on the buildout, according to CNBC. Core profit excluding the new AI ventures still grew 19%, underscoring that the drag is a deliberate spending choice rather than a demand problem.

Anthropic is in discussions to acquire Decart, which builds real-time generative video and GPU-optimization technology, in a deal that could be worth roughly $6 billion, according to a Bloomberg report carried by Investing.com. The talks land in the same week Anthropic's own backers are pricing the company's prospective IPO above $2 trillion — a reminder of how much capital is now cycling through AI consolidation deals on top of the fundraising itself.

Google opened its first flagship retail store outside the United States in Tokyo's fashion-forward Omotesando district Thursday afternoon, offering hands-on access to the Pixel 11 lineup unveiled a day earlier along with on-site repair service, according to News On Japan. Japan was the site of Google's first overseas office, and the company is leaning on that history in positioning Tokyo as its beachhead for physical retail.

YMTC captured 14% of global NAND flash shipments in the second quarter, moving ahead of Micron and Kioxia (285A) behind only Samsung's 25% and SK Hynix's 22%, according to Counterpoint Research data carried by the South China Morning Post. The same research shows server-focused enterprise SSDs reaching 48% of total NAND shipments as AI workloads shift from training toward inference — a demand mix that continues to reshape where Japan's own flash-memory supply chain sits in the pecking order.

Toei Animation, the studio behind franchises from Dragon Ball to One Piece, marked its 70th anniversary with a commemorative video tracing its history since 1956, when it produced Japan's first full-color animated feature film, according to Anime News Network. The studio has produced 247 television series and 278 theatrical films over 7 decades, and July 31st is now formally recognized in Japan as "Toei Animation Day."

Kohei Horikoshi published his first major original work since ending My Hero Academia — a 61-page, full-color horror one-shot called "Quit Laughing, Shijima-san," about a boy who falls for a girl marked as the latest sacrifice to a sea god in her coastal town, according to ComicBook.com. Horikoshi had said during MHA's final arc that he'd long wanted to try his hand at horror.

The live-action adaptation of soccer manga Blue Lock opened at number 8 on the Japanese box office chart, drawing 188,212 admissions and ¥277.6 million ($1.7 million) over its first weekend, according to Anime News Network. It's a modest start for one of the more closely watched manga-to-live-action bets of the year.

The Busan International Film Festival's Asian Contents & Film Market named Japan its focus country for 2026, spotlighting Japanese producers and projects at the market's producer hub, according to Variety. The designation is a fresh marker of how much regional pull Japanese content continues to carry across Asian entertainment markets.

Police and firefighters spent Thursday searching a Kawasaki neighborhood for two roughly 2-meter pythons that slipped out of their owner's third-floor apartment overnight after he left both the cage door and a balcony screen unlocked, according to the Tokyo Reporter. The snakes aren't venomous and aren't classified as dangerous under Japanese law, which hasn't stopped a roughly 30-person search team from combing the Tama Ward area for them all afternoon.