Oil prices slip and world shares are mixed as investors sell AI stocks in Asia

Oil prices slipped and world shares were mixed on Thursday as investors sold artificial intelligence-related stocks in Asia, with South Korea's Kospi falling 1.2% after losing more than 16% over the past two days. The Kospi has fallen more than 38% from its all-time closing high in June, reflecting broader doubts about massive investments in building AI capacity, according to analysts. Brent crude slipped 0.2% to $87.92 per barrel after the U.S. conducted strikes against Iran.

HONG KONG AP — Oil prices bounced between gains and losses on Thursday and world shares were mixed, with South Korea's Kospi falling again after losing more than 16% over the past two days due to selling of stocks related to artificial intelligence-related. Crude prices remained 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. Brent crude, the international standard, slipped 0.2% to $87.92 per barrel after rising earlier. It was trading around $72 a barrel in late February, before the Iran war began. Benchmark U.S. crude lost 0.3% to $84.25 per barrel. The future for the S&P 500 was up 0.4% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.2%. In early European trading, Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.2% to 10,930.40. France's CAC 40 surged 0.8% to 8,477.55. Germany's DAX was nearly unchanged at 25,457.08. In South Korea, recent declines in its benchmark Kospi, a big beneficiary of the global boom in AI https://apnews.com/hub/artificial-intelligence , have been viewed by some analysts as a reflection of broader doubts about massive investments https://apnews.com/article/ai-inflation-federal-reserve-434f02e62a02f9b92e57995d9375df57 in building AI capacity. The Kospi fell 1.2% to 5,593.56, after falling 10.8% on Tuesday and nearly 6% on Wednesday. The benchmark has fallen more than 38% from its all-time closing high of more than 9,100 in June, though it's still up nearly 30% so far this year. Samsung Electronics fell 0.7%, even 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 5.6% 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 0.7% to 61,867.43, recovering some of its losses after falling 1.5% a day earlier. Open-AI investor SoftBank Group fell 2.5%. But computer chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron climbed 4.5%. Memory chipmaker Kioxia Holdings added 2.9%. Taiwan's Taiex, which was also lifted by the AI boom, closed 0.3% lower. Its leading chipmaker TSMC edged up 0.2%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng edged up 0.2% to 25,858.88. The Shanghai Composite index lost 0.6% to 3,804.69. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.8% to 8,967.70. India's Sensex was mostly unchanged. On Wednesday, the benchmark S&P 500 dropped 1.5% and the Dow industrials fell 2.2%. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index lost 1.7%. Several chipmaking big names fell. Nvidia lost 3.6% and AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, shed 5.5%. Broadcom declined 2.8%.