Key Events of the Week: What Happened Due to the Lunar New Year holiday in Taiwan, this issue combines observations from the second and third weeks of February 2026. During these two weeks, the US technology sector did not experience a single highly dramatic event. Compared with the concentration and emotional amplification triggered by frontier AI developments earlier in the month, the market environment became more dispersed and notably calmer. The focus of discussion shifted

Key Events of the Week: What Happened In the first week of February 2026, discussion across the US technology sector showed a clear moment of convergence. Market attention was briefly pulled toward frontier AI developments, pushing conversations higher in intensity and reviving underlying anxieties about software economics and the role of platforms. This concentration was not simply technological excitement. It resembled a reflexive pause in which the market stepped back to reexamine assumptions that had

Executive Summary From Microsoft to Google, senior executives have increasingly centered their earnings discussions on token efficiency, inference costs, and overall system utilization. This shift in language points to a deeper structural change. As software usage itself begins to incur meaningful costs, the long-held SaaS assumption that higher usage naturally leads to higher margins no longer holds universally. For software companies that lack scale, bargaining power over compute resources, or structural cost advantages, heavy users

Key Events of the Week: What Happened As the US tech sector moved into the fifth week of January 2026, the conversation did not show a new directional shift. Instead, it reflected a clearer phase of confirmation. The market has begun to repeatedly test its judgments within the same underlying question framework. Technological progress continues, and investment in AI has not slowed. What has changed is the focus of attention. Rather than rushing to determine

Key Events of the Week: What Happened Last week, during the fourth week of January 2026, the focus of discussion in the US technology sector continued to narrow, gradually gradually forming a clearer basis for judgment. For several weeks in a row, the market has returned to the same underlying question. Technical leadership and model progress remain part of the conversation, but they are no longer the central issue. In this round of structural change,

Executive Summary Apple has recently deepened the integration of creative tools and generative capabilities into its operating system, prompting market speculation about whether the company is moving into direct competition with Adobe. Yet viewing this shift purely through the lens of creative software rivalry risks missing the structural transformation now underway. At its core, Apple’s move is not about enhancing the performance of individual tools. It is about relocating the act of creation itself to

Key Events of the Week: What Happened Last week, during the third week of January 2026, the focus of discussion within the US technology sector shifted in a noticeable way. Market attention was no longer centered solely on which new products companies had released or how much model performance had improved. Instead, the conversation began to move toward a different level. The central question became which technological capabilities were being incorporated into long term national,

Executive Summary In the second half of 2025, the conversation around AI began to shift away from model capabilities and application competition toward concerns about power and infrastructure. As a result, the idea that AI growth will be constrained by electricity has quickly taken hold as a narrative that feels both reasonable and intuitive. However, from the perspective of on the ground deployment and operations, as well as from the upstream supply side, the most

Executive Summary A common intuition in market discussions is that a company’s narrative succeeds as long as its financial performance meets market expectations, and management communicates convincingly, or its products align with the right trends. In practice, however, whether a narrative is accepted by the market is rarely determined by the company alone. For a narrative to have real impact, it must first enter a state in which the market can act on it. Understanding