Hungary's central bank cut its policy rate 25bps to 5.75% on Tuesday, its second consecutive monthly reduction and in line with economists' expectations. The move follows a 25bps cut in June after forint appreciation led the bank to sharply lower its inflation forecast and shift policy toward easing. Governor Varga said there is room to deliver two further 25bps cuts over the summer, with a reassessment of economic conditions in September. Analysts, including Capital Economics EM economist Liam

Z.ai has commissioned a 1GW-class domestic AI compute data centre that uses only domestic AI chips, and today completed the acquisition of XCore Sigma, a heterogeneous AI compute software firm spun out of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. XCore Sigma specialises in heterogeneous compute software stacks and compiler optimisation and is regarded as one of China’s leading AI infra teams, sources said. The two moves respectively address compute supply and compute utilisation: the data centre expands large-model training capacity, while XCore Sigma’s compiler, runtime and inference-engine capabilities aim to raise heterogeneous-chip utilisation, lower inference costs and speed model deployment.

US optical-communications stocks rose in premarket trade; Marvell (MRVL.O) gained about 6%, Corning (GLW.N) rose 4.6%.