JPM International Market Intelligence | Morning Briefing

20 SECONDS: Tech in the lead but some geopol optimism starting to be priced in. Agentic AI and sector spillovers: we still expect Tech leadership to be broader and more dispersed than 1H26. China Tech & trades into Trump-Xi Summit. Energy Security.

• Tech drove global equity rally yesterday, despite oil & energy notably lower as some geopolitical optimism was priced in ahead of UN General Assembly and Trump-Xi Summit.

• Tech bounce fading in APAC this morning, with US/EU futures pointing to muted open.

• Meta Muse behind Tech strength, as it topped app store download charts. Increasing adoption of Agentic AI drove a sharp rally in CPU-linked stocks given requirements for agentic workloads.

• We still expect Tech leadership to be broader and more dispersed than in 1H26 – CPU Ecosystem vs Memory ~7% performance gap notable yesterday.

• Within AI infra one should look at optics, substrates, packaging and SPE—more broadly, inference over training. Security software should remain a winner as agentic AI expands the attack surface.

• In China, key developments that support the domestic AI ecosystem incl. DeepSeek seeking more domestic chips to train models and Alibaba planning to roll out China’s most powerful AI chip in 27Q1 and to operate over 20GW of global data centre capacity by 2032.

• 2 trades we like going into Trump-Xi summit this week:

o Star50 (KSTR) vs KWEB: Star50 more exposed to domestic AI plays vs KWEB more large-cap internet/consumer names.

o REMX: critical minerals remain a secular theme (and also important for Tech trade) but have notably de-rated since peaking at the Trump- Xi Summit in May.

• Energy Security is another topical secular theme. JPM’s Center for Geopolitics is out with a deep dive on the topic, as energy competition shifts from “who can produce the most” to “who can keep energy flowing under stress.”

• The Iran war has emphasized many of these vulnerabilities: Bloomberg reports the cost of hiring a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) from the Persian Gulf to Asia has risen to a record of $1.1mn a day vs $50,000-$100,000 range earlier this year.