In oil markets, Brent crude LCOc1 was down 0.5% at $87.40 and is on track to fall for a fourth consecutive day as Qatar's prime minister heads to Tehran in an effort to relaunch peace talks between the U.S. and Iran.
Gold XAU= rallied 0.7% to $4,624.14 after a pullback on Wednesday, while in cryptocurrency markets, bitcoin BTC= was up 0.5% at $78,822.84 while ether ETH= climbed 0.8% to $2,492.30.
All three are benefiting from the revival of so-called "dollar debasement trades" after the U.S. Treasury department intervened in bond markets last week, this month up 14%, 25% and 34% respectively.
Nvidia drives the tone in markets
It's Nvidia's world now, we just live in it. In case there were any doubt, the chip designer NVDA.O forecast a 70% jump in revenue next fiscal year, a rare disclosure from the world's biggest company of sales so far ahead and a show of confidence from CEO Jensen Huang that demand for its AI chips will remain unabated as far as early 2028.
The stock was up almost 5% in after-hours trading, showing little sign of slowing down after a report in The Information that Nvidia has agreed to pay $12.9 billion to buy AI platform Hugging Face.
That's the same open-source platform that was hacked into last month by OpenAI, which created a swarm of approximately 700 AI agents which tried to cover their tracks, according to an independent investigation into the breach.
More details are trickling out about the behaviour of OpenAI's rogue agents, including the company's disclosure that some of the bots it spun up later broke into its own networks during tests gone wrong.
However unsettling for humanity that may be, all of that has been great news for Asian chipmakers in Nvidia's supply chain. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MISX00000PUS was up 0.5%, led by a 1.8% rise in the KOSPI .KS11, which shrugged off a 25-basis-point rate hike from the Bank of Korea. S&P 500 e-mini futures EScv1 climbed 0.5%.
European futures and the day's calendar
In early European trades, pan-region futures STXEc1 were up 0.4%, German DAX futures FDXc1 edged 0.1% higher, and FTSE futures FFIc1 were down 0.4%.
Key developments that could influence markets on Thursday:
Earnings announcements:
Marvell Technology MRVL.O
Royal Bank of Canada RY.TO
Pernod Ricard PERP.PA
Economic events:
Germany GfK/NIM Consumer Sentiment for September
France: Producer prices and unemployment data for July
NVDA•
