A rare joint call from the heads of Anthropic, xAI and OpenAI to slow down frontier AI work knocked chip and memory stocks across Asia, but fund managers say the long-term AI story is unchanged.

• Anthropic's Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow cutting-edge model development and strengthen safety testing, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman backing him.
• The comments hit markets hard: SoftBank fell as much as 13%, Kioxia and SK Hynix dropped sharply, and Taiwan's index briefly shed nearly 800 points.
• Fund managers call it more good than bad — companies have barely tapped what current models can do, so a slower release cycle gives them time to actually deploy AI.
• Cloud giants are still borrowing at 7–8% to build data centers, a sign the money behind AI is real.
• Taiwan-listed companies just posted record quarterly profits, with earnings more than doubling from a year earlier on stronger-than-expected AI demand.

Outlook: Expect choppy, range-bound trading through the fourth quarter as worries about AI power use and regulation linger, with attention shifting back to profits and cash flow as data centers start earning their keep.