00:00Bloomberg has learned that some of NVIDIA's biggest customers have been told that prices
00:03of its AI service are going up more than 15% in many cases with memory chip costs soaring.
00:09Asia markets will have to price in that news as well as the Alibaba placement as we begin
00:13a new week. Our markets reporter Anthony Stevens joins us from Hong Kong. So lots of the same
00:19questions, the sort of existential questions over the expensiveness of various things within
00:23this AI universe. The Alibaba block, how does that set up the day for us?
00:30Yeah, as you said, there's a lot of moving parts in the AI trade, but the fundamental
00:33part is flow keeps coming, right? There is a flood of AI paper coming to the market and
00:37the Alibaba trade actually came really tight compared to where it should be trading given
00:42how much the stock moves, right? It's around a three times ADV block. It came in one sigma
00:47move of the stock, meaning just a one standard deviation move for the stock. So it's quite
00:51tight and you can see that there is a lot of demand for AI paper. It's seemingly insatiable,
00:56right? We're talking about IPO demand, IG issuance demand, and then private credit demand. So while
01:02that demand picture is still very strong, that sets up Asia quite well, at least in the kind
01:07of AI trade. But the weight of all of these issuance continues to put pressure on literally
01:12everything else, right? We saw the US momentum factor continuing to deteriorate. So the highest
01:18risk parts of the market are cracking, even though the market overall in the US is quite stable.
01:23And that is being reflected more or less in Asia as these bigger companies kind of find
01:28their feet and they return cash to the market in the case of Korea, for example. And we also
01:33have the NVIDIA earnings in the back end of this week, right? So we get a big update from
01:38the top end of the AI trade and maybe that starts to dominate as momentum underneath starts
01:43to pull back. So it'll be a very interesting session in Asia as we try to digest that huge
01:48flow alongside the NVIDIA price hikes.
