AI Boom Drowns Out War Fears to Fuel Asia’s Great Market Divide

Asia’s markets are behaving as though two different worlds exist at once. In South and Southeast Asia, higher oil prices are straining trade balances and sending stocks tumbling in India, Indonesia and the Philippines. In North Asia, enthusiasm for chipmakers and artificial intelligence companies is driving equity benchmarks in South Korea and Taiwan to repeated record highs with little regard for the war in the Middle East. The divergence highlights two competing narratives in global markets, with investors punishing economies exposed to higher energy costs while looking past near-term geopolitical risks if they can gain exposure to industries seen as…