People watch the first sunrise of the new year from a footbridge overlooking the city skyline in Seoul on January 1, 2024.
Jung Yeon-je | Afp | Getty Images
Asia-Pacific markets tumbled Thursday as investors on Wall Street continued to rotate out of tech.
Artificial intelligence-related stocks dragged indexes after the Financial Times reported that Oracle’s primary investor, Blue Owl Capital, pulled out from funding one of its data center projects. Shares of the AI stock tumbled 5.4%.
Other stocks tied to the AI trade also fell, including chipmaker Broadcom, AI darling Nvidia, and Advanced Micro Devices.
Over in Asia, the Bank of Japan will kick off its two-day meeting, with the central bank expected to raise rates to 0.75% Friday, its highest level in 30 years.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 lost 1.53%, leading losses in Asia, while the Topix fell 0.45%. Softbank Group Corp was among the top losers in the benchmark Nikkei 225, falling as much as 7.25%. The group pared some losses and was last trading 3% lower.
Other Japanese tech stocks also fell. Semiconductor equipment supplier Advantest, dropped as much as 5%. Counterparts Lasertec, Renesas Electronics and Tokyo Electron declined between 3% and 4%.
South Korea’s Kospi was down 1.36%, and the small-cap Kosdaq was 0.64% lower.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.3%.
Shares of Australian energy giant Woodside Energy declined 1.84% after the firm announced that CEO and managing director Meg O’Neill had resigned and accepted the role of CEO at British oil and gas major BP.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index opened 0.76% lower, while the mainland CSI 300 was flat. Shares of Chinese chipmaker MetaX Integrated Circuits slid as much as 7% after soaring nearly 700% in their market debut in Shanghai on Wednesday. The company raised nearly $600 million in its initial public offering.
Overnight in the U.S., all three major indexes fell, with the S&P 500 down 1.16%, and the Nasdaq Composite seeing the largest loss of 1.81%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.47%.
Traders are awaiting the release of the U.S. consumer price index reading for November, due Thursday morning. It will mark the first consumer inflation report issued to the public since the government shutdown ended last month. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect that headline inflation grew at a 3.1% pace on a year-over-year basis.
—CNBC’s Lim Hui Jie, Pia Singh, Sean Conlon and Liz Napolitano contributed to this report.