The referee bought it — Palantir +15% on a 93% quarter, while Korea's board splits in half
Palantir smashed the quarter and the tape bought it for the first time in four prints, the Dow closed at a record on a four-year high in ISM — and then Asia refused to follow, with Korea's small-cap board ripping seven percent while Samsung and SK Hynix fell three.
The AI contest is not one race but roughly ten overlapping ones, and most of the companies in it sit on both sides of at least one. Read them together and the interesting thing is not who has the best model — it is which layer stays scarce. Models are becoming plentiful. Connectivity is being standardised. What remains hard is enterprise context, permissions, governed execution and the right to write a change back into a production system. Last night the tape paid for exactly that layer, and in the same forty-eight hours it sold the layer that is becoming abundant.