PRE-MARKET TAIWAN & SINGAPORE STOCK NEWS: ASE Technology (3711 TT) raised its FY capital expenditure budget by 23.5% to USD 10.5bln from USD 8.5bln amid strong demand for AI applications, Nasdaq 100 finished higher on Friday, although tech weighs on Asia

Pre-market Asian wraps of this kind aggregate single-name guidance and prints rather than carry a single tradeable signal; the common thread here is the AI capex cycle feeding through the Taiwan supply chain, from OSAT spend at ASE to power-management shipments at Lite-On and accelerator ambitions at MediaTek. Raises of this size to full-year capex budgets at assembly and test houses have historically been read as a confirmation of orders already in hand rather than fresh demand, since backend capacity additions lag the logic-chip lead; the tell in past episodes has been whether the foundry and fabless names at the front of the chain echo the raise or let it stand alone. The distinction worth drawing within the tape is between the AI-leveraged Taiwan complex, where guidance is uniformly constructive, and the Singapore property names, where the drag traces to Chinese real estate and follows its own, unrelated cycle. Hon Hai's high utilisation on a newly commissioned AI cluster fits the established pattern of infrastructure names reporting capacity absorbed faster than it can be built, a read-across that has tended to support the server ODM peer set rather than the broader index. Follow-ons worth noting are whether the capex revision is corroborated at the next round of results across the island's supply chain, and whether the overnight divergence between a firmer Nasdaq close and softer Asia-Pac cash persists into the session, since tech has historically led rather than followed the regional tape on days when US futures are bid.