Nikkei jumps 2.5% above 70,000 to three-month high as AI stocks rally

JUST IN: Japan's Nikkei jumps 2.5% above 70,000 to a three-month high, led by a surge in chip stocks like Tokyo Electron and Advantest as the AI rally powers on.

The Nikkei just punched through 70,000. Up two and a half percent, a three-month high, and it's the chip names doing the heavy lifting.

Tokyo Electron and Advantest led the charge, the two stocks that live or die on how much the world spends building AI. Right now the answer is apparently everything it has. When the AI trade catches fire in New York, Tokyo wakes up and pours fuel on it, and that's exactly what Monday morning looked like on the exchange floor.

Step back for a second. Seventy thousand on the Nikkei is the kind of number that would've sounded like a typo not long ago. This index spent three decades crawling back to its 1989 peak, and now it's sprinting past milestones on the back of silicon.

The entire rally rests on one assumption, that AI spending never slows down. The day that wobbles, Tokyo feels it first.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.