Kospi closes 3.1% higher as AI chip stocks rally in Seoul
South Korea's benchmark Kospi briefly climbed more than four per cent before closing 3.1 per cent higher at 5,638.34 on Tuesday, as buyers piled into the chipmakers at the centre of the artificial-intelligence build-out. SK Hynix rose 5.2 per cent and Samsung Electronics gained 4.2 per cent, with SK Hynix due to report third-quarter earnings on Wednesday and Samsung following a day later. Samsung has estimated its operating profit for the last quarter will be up nearly eight-fold from a year earlier.
The semiconductor trade also lifted Tokyo, where the Nikkei 225 added 1.7 per cent to 63,268.37. Testing equipment maker Advantest jumped 9.6 per cent and SoftBank Group, an investor in OpenAI, climbed five per cent. South Korea's economy expanded at a better-than-expected 3.4 per cent annual rate in July-September, data released on Tuesday showed, with strong global demand for chips driving the growth.
Elsewhere the picture was mixed. In early European trading Germany's DAX slipped 0.1 per cent to 25,373.71, the CAC 40 in Paris dropped 0.3 per cent to 7,824.83 and Britain's FTSE 100 fell one per cent to 10,664.58. Futures for the S&P 500 lost 0.1 per cent while those for the Dow Jones Industrial Average were little changed. Hong Kong's Hang Seng gave up early gains to slip 0.7 per cent at 23,041.32 and the Shanghai Composite dropped 1.3 per cent to 3,648.30, with traders watching for announcements from a closed-door meeting of China's top leaders. Taiwan's Taiex rose 0.1 per cent, India's Sensex slipped 0.5 per cent and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 advanced 0.5 per cent to 8,852.10.
The AI trade remains unsettled beneath the surface. On Monday the S&P 500 rose 0.7 per cent, helped by a 2.4 per cent gain for Nvidia, but other AI-linked stocks have been swerving on worries that borrowing costs for data centres and chips are climbing. Anthropic disclosed details of its losses as it prepares to sell its stock on the publicly traded US market for the first time, and SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company that also runs xAI, swung after announcing a roughly US$40 billion deal with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management to lease AI computing power. Alphabet and Microsoft report results on Wednesday, with Amazon on Thursday.
The Fed raised the fed funds rate last month for the first time in three years in an effort to slow inflation, which has remained much higher than anyone would like. In other dealings, Brent crude rose 0.7 per cent to $111.54 a barrel and US benchmark crude gained 0.7 per cent to $102.47. The dollar rose to 157.75 Japanese yen from 157.50, and the euro slipped to $1.1154 from $1.1176.
