AI NARRATIVE LOCALIZATION AND SECTORAL CO-MOVEMENT IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Global technology narratives do not become locally price-relevant in smaller emerging markets in a uniform way. Evidence from Malaysian equity linkages shows that artificial intelligence (AI) narrative localization is selective rather than broad-based. Global technology sentiment alone does not uniformly reshape domestic sectoral co-movement. The strongest and most robust post-break evidence appears in the technology–utilities linkage, identifying the compute–power nexus as the main channel through which AI-related attention became visible in Malaysian market linkages. Property/REIT-related linkages move in the expected direction, but they remain weaker under conservative inference and more sensitive to proxy construction. These findings indicate that AI narrative localization depends on concrete domestic implementation constraints rather than generic thematic exposure. The paper contributes to narrative economics and investor-attention research by documenting the boundary conditions under which a global technology story becomes observable in local equity pricing.