[From Collyer Bridge] APAC Wrap: 17 July 2026

Collyer Bridge believes the market would be less straightforward in the second half of the year after the recent vicious drawdown in AI-related names.

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You might have noticed that this newsletter has been more muted about new ideas since June, and that there has not been a post dedicated to a standalone idea or theme since May.

We’re committed to presenting a balanced view, even if it comes at the expense of clicks. As we entered the second half of the year, my conversations with experts and investors surfaced questions that were indicative of a more cautious posture. In particular, there was a growing concern that frontier labs may not be as good a business as advertised, coupled with uncertainty about the implications for the AI buildout.

We then saw more model competition in the form of Grok 4.5, a surge of investor interest in hyperscaler capex plans, followed by concerns about memory costs being too high.

Funda quickly addressed the Meta Cloud concerns, but it seemed to dominate the conversations with clients for an entire week.

Funda’s view on Grok catching up is that it is bullish for compute, and the firm continues to argue that fundamentals are unchanged.