Week 29 was defined by a single event: Xi Jinping's debut keynote at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, the clearest signal yet that Beijing is positioning itself as the leader of a new global AI order explicitly counterposed to Washington's export-control regime. The summit produced a remarkable density of headline-grade announcements, from Apple Intelligence finally clearing Chinese regulators via Alibaba's Qwen and Baidu's models, to Reuters reporting that DeepSeek is developing its own AI silicon, to a Huawei-led team post-training DeepSeek's 1.6-trillion-parameter V4-Pro on one thousand domestic Ascend 910C chips. On the US side, the five largest banks kicked off the Q2 earnings season with a collective roughly 39 percent year-over-year jump in quarterly earnings, powered by a Wall Street trading and investment-banking boom and one-off SpaceX IPO–related fees. The portfolio made no changes this week. We are holding all existing positions into the half-year earnings cycle that is now underway, and our outlook for week 30 is correspondingly light: monitor the next wave of mega-cap tech prints, watch the FOMC meeting on the horizon, and let our existing theses be validated by actual results.
Week 29 Recap
The week's dominant story was not in the United States at all but in Shanghai, where the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) was expanded into a combined conference and high-level meeting on global AI governance. More than 1,100 companies, 1,400 guests, and 3,000 exhibits participated, with over 300 AI products making their global debuts. The most significant development was that President Xi Jinping delivered his first-ever keynote at WAIC, an escalation that signals AI policy is now being driven at the very top of the Chinese leadership. The symbolism is impossible to miss: this is the first time a sitting Chinese president has personally anchored the country's flagship AI conference, and the choice to do so in a week that also produced the largest US bank earnings beat in years was not accidental.
Xi Jinping's "AI for All" Speech and the WAICO Launch
Xi's address was explicitly framed as a geopolitical counter-narrative to the US export-control regime. He pitched China as the champion of a "new global AI order," declaring that AI "should not be dominated by any single nation" and that it should be a "symphony" rather than a solo performance. He hailed China's progress in low-cost AI development, a clear nod to DeepSeek and the open-weight Chinese model ecosystem that has fundamentally reshaped the global cost curve for frontier capability. On the diplomatic front, Xi pledged 5,000 AI training and seminar opportunities for developing countries and announced AI cooperation centres with BRICS, ASEAN, Latin American, and African Union nations. The headline institutional deliverable was the signing of the establishment agreement for the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) on the eve of the conference, a body explicitly designed to give Beijing a parallel-track governance forum outside the US-led AI Safety Institute network. The message was packaged as "AI for All," and it was aimed squarely at the Global South.
The Apple-Alibaba-Baidu Deal: A Watershed for Chinese AI Commercialization
The single most commercially consequential announcement of the week was the long-awaited approval of Apple Intelligence for launch in China, integrating Alibaba's (BABA) Qwen model for Apple Intelligence features across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and Baidu's AI models for search and compliance. This is the deal that finally cleared Chinese regulatory approval this past week, and its significance is hard to overstate. Apple is gaining access to the world's largest iPhone installed base for its AI features, and Alibaba and Baidu are being locked into a high-volume, high-visibility distribution channel that runs through every Apple device sold in mainland China. For our Alibaba position, this is the cleanest fundamental catalyst we have had since the Pentagon Section 1260H deadline passed without removal in late June. It validates the commercial value of the Qwen model family, it provides a durable consumer-facing revenue stream that does not depend on enterprise sales cycles, and it puts BABA's advertising and cloud attach economics on a structurally higher trajectory. Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares rose roughly 5 percent on the news and reportedly hit a three-year high near HK$124.1.
DeepSeek's Silicon Bet and Huawei's Ascend Milestone
Two stories on the silicon side deserve particular attention. First, Reuters reported this week that DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip, a potential long-term challenge to Huawei's current dominance of the domestic AI silicon market. DeepSeek's V4 model, released earlier this year, was already adapted for Huawei's Ascend chips, but a vertical move into custom silicon would signal fragmentation within China's domestic AI stack and would give DeepSeek more bargaining power over its compute costs. Second, and more immediately consequential, a Huawei-led team post-trained DeepSeek's 1.6-trillion-parameter V4-Pro model on one thousand Ascend 910C chips. This is the strongest public evidence yet that China can train frontier-scale models without Nvidia, and it directly undermines the long-term efficacy of the US export-control regime. Huawei is also reportedly moving toward 100 percent domestic production of its AI chips, and SMIC shares rose roughly 7.6 percent following Huawei's "LogicFolding" chip-design architecture announcement, which is being positioned as a potential post-Moore's-Law path around lithography limits. For semiconductor investors, the takeaway is that the gap between Nvidia-led and Huawei-led training capability is narrowing faster than the consensus assumed six months ago.
Capital Flowing Into Chinese Generative AI
Beyond the headlines, the capital flows underscore how aggressively Chinese mega-caps are chasing the generative AI opportunity. Alibaba and Tencent (TCEHY) reportedly invested over $2.8 billion into Kling AI, pushing its valuation to nearly $15 billion. The Chinese open-weight model stack, including DeepSeek V4, Qwen3-Max, Doubao Seed 1.6, and Kimi K3, continues to close the gap with proprietary Western models, and the pace of model drops has accelerated meaningfully in recent weeks. On the macro side, China's integrated circuit exports expanded 88.7 percent in the first half of the year despite US chip curbs, making semiconductors a major Chinese growth engine even as Washington tightens restrictions. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index jumped as much as 3.6 percent during the week, the largest single-day move in roughly fourteen months, led by tech. There is a caveat worth flagging: SCMP noted bubble fears are starting to weigh on sentiment, and Yahoo Finance flagged that even 1,000-percent-plus profit gains may not be enough to revive the rally from here. Chinese AI stocks surged roughly 65 percent in the first half of the year, and the easy money has likely been made. We remain constructive on BABA and TCEHY on a fundamental basis, but we are not adding into strength here.
US Bank Earnings: A Strong Start to the Season
While Shanghai dominated the news flow, the US earnings season opened on a remarkably strong note. The five largest US banks posted a collective roughly 39 percent year-over-year jump in quarterly earnings, powered by a Wall Street trading and investment-banking boom and one-off SpaceX IPO–related fees. Global investment-banking revenue rose 24 percent to $61.4 billion in the first half. JPMorgan Chase (JPM) delivered the highest quarterly profit in bank history, with net income of $21.2 billion, EPS of $7.70 versus consensus near $5.50, and revenue of $58 billion. Goldman Sachs (GS) produced the biggest beat of the group, with EPS of $20.98 versus $14.47 consensus, annualized ROE of 23.5 percent, and a record $1.2 trillion of announced M&A in the first half. Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley all beat on the headline as well, with Morgan Stanley crossing the $10 trillion client-asset milestone on record wealth-management revenue. The KBW Bank Index hit a fresh all-time high during the week. The one note of caution came from Jamie Dimon, who reiterated warnings on credit-cycle and "bond crisis" risks from rising global sovereign debt and flagged AI-driven job cuts at JPMorgan itself. We do not hold any of the money-center banks directly, but the strength of the bank earnings is a constructive macro signal for the broader earnings season now underway.
Portfolio: Holding Steady
We made no changes to the portfolio this week. All existing positions, including Alibaba (BABA), Tencent (TCEHY), the iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ), iShares Gold Producers UCITS ETF (IAUP.L), and iShares MSCI Global Silver and Metals Miners ETF (SLVP), remain in place. The thesis for staying put is straightforward: the half-year earnings cycle is now underway, and the next several weeks will produce the actual fundamental data that will either validate or challenge our positioning. Adding or trimming ahead of those prints would be a speculative bet on information we do not yet have. The Apple-Alibaba deal alone is a meaningful fundamental upgrade to our BABA thesis.
Week 30 Outlook
Week 30 is the heaviest earnings week of the season so far, with the mega-cap technology complex beginning to report in earnest. The headline names are Tesla and Alphabet, with Intel also on the calendar. The fundamental question for each is different, but the meta-theme is the same: can the massive 2026 capital expenditure cycle, with Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft together planning roughly $725 billion in capex (up 77 percent year-over-year), be monetized fast enough to justify the multiples? The market is no longer giving AI capex the benefit of the doubt for free, and the prints in the days ahead will set the tone for how the rest of the season trades.
Tesla and Alphabet Headline the Calendar
Tesla (TSLA) enters its print down roughly 22 percent year-to-date, and the shareholder Q&A portal is being flooded with demands for answers on missed robotaxi milestones. Tesla has missed short-term robotaxi guidance for three consecutive quarters, and Deutsche Bank has explicitly warned that the company must deliver in 2026. We will be watching for concrete progress on the robotaxi launch, updates on the Optimus humanoid robot, FSD adoption metrics, auto gross margins, and capex discipline. We do not hold Tesla directly, but the print is a sentiment bellwether for the broader AI-and-autonomy trade. Alphabet (GOOGL) is the more consequential print for our macro view. The focus will be on AI monetization versus the staggering 2026 capex bill, Google Cloud growth and profitability, Search and ads revenue resilience, YouTube performance, and the regulatory overhang. If Google Cloud can demonstrate that AI infrastructure spend is translating into accelerating revenue, it will be a positive read-through for the entire AI capex cycle. Intel (INTC) rounds out the headline names, with the focus on foundry progress, cost cuts, and the turnaround trajectory under the new strategy.
Fed Meeting on the Horizon
Beyond earnings, the FOMC meeting looms in the days ahead under Chair Kevin Warsh, with the federal funds rate currently at 3.50 to 3.75 percent. Rate-hike odds have risen sharply in recent sessions, with CNBC's FedWatch tool now showing roughly 46.5 percent odds of a quarter-point hike at this meeting, up from roughly 34 percent earlier. The July Monetary Policy Report reaffirmed the on-hold stance, but hot-button inflation and labor data have markets re-pricing. We do not expect a hike at this meeting, but the shift in market pricing is itself a meaningful input for equity multiples and precious metals. If the FOMC statement or the press conference pushes back decisively against the hike narrative, it would be a tailwind for both our gold and silver miners exposure and for the broader risk complex. If the committee validates the market's repricing, we should expect a further backup in real yields and a headwind for the precious metals trade in the near term.
Positioning Into Week 30
We are not planning any portfolio changes in week 30. The combination of a heavy earnings calendar, a live FOMC meeting, and the still-fresh signal from the Shanghai AI summit gives us enough macro and fundamental information to wait for the data to come to us rather than reach for it. The theses on BABA and TCEHY were materially strengthened by the Apple Intelligence deal and the broader WAIC announcements, and we will look to the August half-year prints for those names as the next major validation point. The gold and silver miners exposure remains asymmetric to the upside on the macro inputs we track, and the Brazil EWZ position continues to offer the conservative valuation and active easing cycle that originally attracted us to it. The most likely course of action in week 30 is no action at all, and that is the correct posture when the fundamental data is about to arrive in volume.