Oil prices slip and Asian shares are mostly lower as investors sell chipmaker stocks

Oil prices slipped and Asian shares traded mostly lower Wednesday, with South Korea's Kospi extending losses after falling more than 16% over the past two days, as investors sold chipmaker stocks amid doubts about massive AI investments by technology giants. The Kospi was down 1.3% to 5,587.82, while Samsung Electronics gained 2.4% after reporting a record operating profit, and SK Hynix lost 4% despite a nearly sixfold profit increase that fell short of expectations.

HONG KONG AP — Oil prices fell Wednesday and Asian shares were mostly trading lower as South Korea's Kospi extended its losses after falling more than 16% over the past two days. Crude prices remain volatile after the U.S. said early Thursday it had conducted a "heavy wave" of strikes against Iran https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-trump-saudi-arabia-israel-cbb2c3f49f3072c542fc6395468b64b5 , responding to an attack on a U.S. base. U.S. futures edged higher after losses on Wall Street https://apnews.com/article/stocks-markets-ai-oil-trump-rates-b8bfaf782877957bbaa7196b70a4d725 . In South Korea, recent drops in its benchmark Kospi, a big beneficiary of the global boom in artificial intelligence https://apnews.com/hub/artificial-intelligence , have been seen by some analysts as a reflection of broader doubts about massive investments https://apnews.com/article/ai-inflation-federal-reserve-434f02e62a02f9b92e57995d9375df57 by technology giants in expanding capacity for AI. The Kospi was swinging on Thursday and was down 1.3% to 5,587.82, after falling 10.8% on Tuesday and nearly 6% on Wednesday. The benchmark has fallen more than 35% from its all-time high of more than 9,000 in June, though it's still up roughly 30% so far this year. Samsung Electronics gained 2.4%, after the South Korean technology giant reported a record operating profit https://apnews.com/article/samsung-ai-profit-memory-chips-10c2c548a392988862d8c7bd3f6fae05 for the latest quarter, largely in line with estimates. Chipmaker SK Hynix lost 4% after sinking more than 9% on Wednesday, when it also reported a record quarterly operating profit, which ballooned nearly sixfold. That was still lower than what analysts had expected and disappointed investors dumped its shares. In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 gained 0.6% to 61,778.02. Open-AI investor SoftBank Group fell 2.7%. But computer chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron climbed 4.4%. Memory chipmaker Kioxia Holdings added 7.5%. Taiwan's Taiex, which was also lifted by the AI boom, advanced 0.8%. Its leading chipmaker TSMC was trading 1.8% higher. Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell less than 0.1% to 25,779.70. The Shanghai Composite index lost 1.2% to 3,784.55. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.9% to 8,959.90. India's Sensex was less than 0.1% higher. Oil prices fell on Thursday even as the U.S. and Iran resumed exchanging attacks. U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. would hit Iran "very hard," after it targeted a U.S. base in Jordan. Maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for oil transport, remains limited, putting pressure on global supplies. Brent crude, the international standard, lost 1% to $87.18 per barrel after rising sharply a day earlier. It was trading around $72 a barrel in late February, before the war began. Benchmark U.S. crude declined 0.9% to $83.74 per barrel. In the U.S. on Wednesday, the benchmark S&P 500 dropped 1.5% to 7,316.15. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.2% to 51.594.14, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite lost 1.7% to 24,442.94.