Across global markets this week, two ancient forces — hope and reckoning — pulled in opposite directions. Asian chipmakers rose on the enduring faith that artificial intelligence will reshape civilization and require vast material infrastructure to do so, while American technology giants faced a harder question: whether ambition, however grand, can justify its own cost. Into this already unsettled landscape came the smell of oil smoke from the Red Sea, where geopolitical conflict threatened to rekindle inflation and complicate the choices of central bankers already walking a narrow path.