HONG KONG — Asian shares were mostly higher Wednesday after AI stocks drove gains on Wall Street.
U.S. futures edged higher and oil prices rose.
South Korea’s Kospi rose 6.8% to close at 6,023.73.
Memory chipmaker SK Hynix jumped 11.4% to its highest level in two weeks after it reported a record-high operating profit of 83.3 trillion won ($62.8 billion) for the last quarter, up nearly seven-fold from a year earlier and beating market estimates.
Samsung Electronics surged 9.1%. It is set to report its third-quarter earnings Thursday.
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 rallied 1.1% to 63,954.19. Semiconductor maker Kioxia Holdings climbed 9.6% ahead of its quarterly earnings report on Friday.
The Bank of Japan is scheduled to hold a two-day policy meeting on Thursday, with markets expecting the interest rate unchanged.
In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng recovered 0.2% to 23,089.22 after erasing earlier losses, while the Shanghai Composite index edged 0.5% higher, to 3,666.50.
Taiwan’s Taiex advanced 2%.
India’s Sensex fell 0.8%. Jio Platforms, India’s largest telecom company, surged 21% in its market debut after the country’s biggest ever initial public offering.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.3% to 8,847.30.
Amid a busy week for central banks, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand surprised market watchers by keeping its benchmark interest rate at 2.75%.
The S&P/NZX 50 Index edged 0.1% higher.
On Tuesday, the S&P 500 rose 0.6% and pulled within 1.2% of its all-time high set earlier this month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added less than 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.2%.
The majority of stocks within the S&P 500 fell, but gains for influential AI stocks made up for that. AI stocks rose to another winning day after swerving for weeks on worries about whether their boom is under threat because of how expensive it's become for companies to borrow money to build data centers and buy more AI chips.
Broadcom climbed 4% after announcing a $63 billion financing deal where several Wall Street firms will help Anthropic get access to Broadcom's XPU AI accelerators and networking solutions.
Elsewhere in the industry, Nvidia added 0.9% and was one of the strongest forces behind Broadcom pushing the S&P 500 higher. CoreWeave, a company that’s borrowed money to buy AI chips that it rents out to customers over the cloud, jumped 7.9%.
Companies overall are under pressure to deliver big growth in profits. Expectations are high among financial analysts and investors, and that’s what allowed their stock prices to run to records recently despite high inflation, high interest rates and other concerns weighing on the market.
Boeing fell 10.7% after reporting a larger loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
Confidence among U.S. shoppers has tumbled recently as pressure keeps building on them from high inflation. But a report on Tuesday said that U.S. consumer confidence improved in October, when economists expected further weakening.
In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady a day before the Federal Reserve is scheduled to announce its latest decision on interest rates. The Fed last month hiked the fed funds rate for the first time in three years in hopes of slowing inflation, but the widespread expectation on Wall Street is that it will hold rates steady this time.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.99% from 5.00% late Monday.
In other dealings Wednesday, Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose 1.5% to $111.10 a barrel. U.S. benchmark crude gained 1.6%, to $101.46 per barrel.
The U.S. dollar slid to 157.85 Japanese yen from 157.91 yen. The euro was trading at $1.1118, down from $1.1127.
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