South Korea AI Spending Fuels Market Volatility as Inflation Softens

South Korean equities slipped on August 5, 2026, even as the government reported that July inflation had cooled to 2.8% year-on-year, its lowest reading in three months and below the 3.0% Reuters consensus estimate. That softer price data would normally count as unambiguously good news for risk assets. It did not. The market's refusal to rally on better-than-expected inflation tells you more about the current macro environment than the CPI figure itself: what investors are actually pricing is not the Bank of Korea's next rate decision, but whether the global AI infrastructure buildout will generate returns commensurate with the hundreds of billions of dollars being deployed into it. Key Take…