AI Euphoria Sweeps Asian Bourses and Draws Record Pledges to France

The global obsession with artificial intelligence is no longer confined to Silicon Valley boardrooms or the Nasdaq. From the trading floors of Seoul to the corridors of the Élysée Palace, AI fervour is reshaping national equity benchmarks, corporate hierarchies, and the investment behaviour of ordinary citizens. In South Korea, the benchmark KOSPI index hurtled towards the once-unthinkable 9,000-point mark, driven by a stampede of retail investors, including a striking wave of retirees abandoning bank deposits.

According to local securities data, those aged 50 and above accounted for more than a fifth of new brokerage accounts opened since late 2025, second only to minors whose parents invest on their behalf. Their strategy is concentrated: domestic chip champions Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, alongside US darlings Tesla and Nvidia, offer the promise of returns that fixed-income products can no longer match. This demographic shift underscores how AI’s capital-market pull is altering long-established savings patterns in an ageing Asian society.

The same technological tide produced a historic changing of the guard in Tokyo. SoftBank Group, the sprawling tech conglomerate led by Masayoshi Son, overtook Toyota Motor to become Japan’s most valuable listed company — ending the automaker’s 23-year reign atop the market. The surge came after Son unveiled a plan to invest €75 billion in a vast AI computing cluster network in France, part of a broader bet that his holdings in OpenAI and chip designer Arm will deliver exponential growth. Toyota’s shares, by contrast, slipped on the same day, a symbolic rotation from industrial might to data-driven ambition.

That French connection is no coincidence. President Emmanuel Macron announced that the latest edition of his “Choose France” summit had secured a record €93 billion in foreign investment pledges, with AI and data centre projects featuring prominently. The figure dwarfs the €20 billion logged a year earlier and even exceeds the cumulative total raised across the previous eight summits. Some 15,000 jobs are expected to be created, underscoring Europe’s determination not to be left behind in the infrastructure buildout that sustains the AI revolution.

Viewed from Washington or London, this triptych of developments points to an accelerating contest for AI supremacy that is redrawing the financial map. Retail punters in Seoul, a billionaire dealmaker in Tokyo, and a French president courting global CEOs are each, in their own way, betting that the boom has further to run. The danger, as ever, is that such unanimity of conviction can breed volatility — but for now, the AI trade looks like the only trade in town.