Asian stocks were mostly higher on Tuesday after an AI-led rally on Wall Street ahead of major corporate earnings and central bank decisions.
US futures edged lower after earlier gains and oil prices extended losses.
South Korea’s Kospi jumped more than 4 per cent and closed 3.1 per cent higher at 5,638.34. Computer chipmaker SK hynix rallied 5.2 per cent and Samsung Electronics gained 4.2 per cent.
SK hynix is set to release its third-quarter earnings on Wednesday, a day before rival Samsung Electronics reports its results. Samsung estimated a record operating profit for the last quarter at 107.4 trillion won (US$80 million), up nearly eight-fold from a year earlier.
Strong global demand for semiconductors is driving strong growth, as the South Korean economy expanded at a better-than-expected 3.4 per cent annual rate in July-September, according to data released on Tuesday.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 added 1.7 per cent to 63,268.37. Testing equipment maker Advantest jumped 9.6 per cent and OpenAI investor SoftBank Group climbed 5 per cent.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gave up early gains, slipping 0.6 per cent to 23,077.56, while the Shanghai Composite dropped 0.3 per cent to 3,648.30.
Traders were watching for any major announcements from a closed-door meeting of top leaders of China’s ruling Communist Party.
Taiwan’s Taiex rose 0.1 per cent. India’s Sensex slipped 0.2 per cent.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 advanced 0.5 per cent to 8,852.10.
On Monday, the S&P 500 rose 0.7 per cent and more than recovered its losses from last week, pulling within 1.8 per cent of its all-time high set earlier this month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.3 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.8 per cent.
The strongest lift for the market came from Nvidia, which rose 2.4 per cent. That helped the chip company recover some of its drop from three straight losing weeks, its longest such streak since June.
But stocks elsewhere in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry remained unsettled. They’ve been swerving on worries about whether their industry’s boom is under threat because of how expensive it’s become for companies to borrow money to build data centres and buy more AI chips.
Meta Platforms bounced up and down after outlining plans to raise US$35 billion by selling stock to help pay for its AI investments. It also said Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom have already indicated they may buy a total of US$5 billion of stock in its offering.
Anthropic, one of the key players of the AI boom, gave details Monday about how much money it’s losing as it prepares to sell its stock on the publicly traded U.S. market for the first time.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company that also runs the xAI business, had similar swings after it announced a roughly US$40-billion deal with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management to lease AI computing power.
Profit reports from huge tech companies this week could offer more details about how spending on AI is going, and whether it’s producing the profits and productivity that proponents promised.
Alphabet and Microsoft will report their latest quarterly results on Wednesday, with Amazon to follow on Thursday.
Roughly one out of every three stocks in the S&P 500 is scheduled to report its latest quarterly results this week.
In the US bond market, yields fell for longer-term Treasuries. The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.98 per cent from 5.00 per cent late Friday.
The two-year Treasury yield rose to 4.71 per cent from 4.69 per cent late Friday. It more closely tracks expectations for what the Federal Reserve will do with overnight interest rates, and the widespread expectation is that it will wrap up its latest meeting on Wednesday without changing the federal funds rate.
The Fed last month hiked the fed funds rate for the first time in three years in hopes of slowing inflation, which has remained much higher than anyone would like.
In other dealings on Tuesday, Brent crude oil, the international standard, fell 0.5 per cent to US$110.21 a barrel. US benchmark crude dropped 1.1 per cent to US$100.66 per barrel.
The dollar rose to 157.79 Japanese yen from 157.50 yen. The euro slipped to US$1.1157 from US$1.1176.
AP
