US MBA mortgage refinance index for week ended July 31: 709.1, down from 723.1 the prior week.

Hong Kong-listed optical-communications stocks rebounded in afternoon trade: Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable (06869.HK) rose more than 17%, Xizhi Technology-P (01879.HK) climbed over 9%, Hua Hong Semiconductor (01347.HK) gained nearly 6%, and Lens Technology (06613.HK) rose over 3%.

Business Insider reports AI startup Anthropic has confirmed it is assembling an internal chip team to design custom accelerators for its Claude model. A job posting and company statement show Anthropic is hiring engineers to design bespoke chips; a spokesperson said this is the company’s first public confirmation. The spokesperson said Anthropic will co-design hardware and AI models so Claude can "run faster and more efficiently at customer scale." They added Anthropic will pursue a multi‑chip strategy and will continue to rely on hardware from AWS, Google, NVIDIA and AMD as key components when scaling compute.