Wall Street mixed in premarket trading as AI stocks give back chunk of Monday's gains

Bangkok, Jul 7 (AP) US markets were mixed early Tuesday as technology stocks gave back a chunk of their gains from a day earlier. Futures for the S&P 500 lost 0.2 per cent while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked up 0.3 per cent. Nasdaq futures fell 1 per cent. Semiconductor and memory-related tech stocks, which lifted markets on Monday, were broadly lower in premarket trading Tuesday. In Asia, chipmaker Samsung Electronics slumped 7.7 per cent despite a 19-fold surge in operating income surged in the last quarter. Its revenue more than doubled. Artificial intelligence stocks have gyrated on fears of a bubble, raising questions about whether all the dollars flowing into AI chips and data centres can possibly create enough gains in productivity and profits to offset all the investments. “The first proper AI stress test may not have arrived with weak demand, a capex warning, or some sudden crack in the data centre story. It may have arrived with Samsung posting an extraordinary quarter and the stock falling anyway,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary. US chipmaker Broadcom, which helped to pull markets higher on Monday with a 3.7 per cent gain, gave most of that back overnight, sliding 2.8 per cent before the opening bell. Micron, Marvell Technology and Intel were all down between 4 per cent and 6 per cent in the early going. Western Digital, a data storage company whose stock has tripled this year on the AI wave, fell 7 per cent before the opening bell. SpaceX, which owns xAI, fell less than 1 per cent ahead of its debut on the Nasdaq 100 index. That inclusion will force funds like the QQQ exchange-traded fund, which mimic the index, to buy SpaceX shares themselves. At midday in Europe, Germany's DAX shed 0.6 per cent, the CAC 40 in Paris climbed 0.3 per cent as did Britain's FTSE 100. Asian shares markets retreated, with South Korea's Kospi closing 4.9 per cent lower at 7,656.31 after dropping as much as 8 per cent earlier in the day. Tokyo's Nikkei 225 declined 2.1 per cent to 68,256.96. Computer chipmaker Tokyo Electron lost 3.9 per cent and chipmaker Kioxia Holdings shed 11.3 per cent. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong declined 0.5 per cent to 23,496.98, while the Shanghai Composite index gave up 1.3 per cent to 3,990.24. Taiwan's Taiex lost 2.3 per cent. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 declined 0.3 per cent to 8,803.90 and India's Sensex shed 0.1 per cent. In oil markets, the price of a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, rose 69 cents to USD 72.68 a barrel. That's close to where it was before the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February, sending prices spiking. The stability of supplies remains uncertain. A tanker travelling off the coast of Oman in the Strait of Hormuz caught on fire early Tuesday morning after being struck by a projectile, the British military said. The attack was the latest targeting a vessel moving through the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, through which a fifth of all oil and natural gas traded once passed in peacetime. Iranian state television said the liquefied natural gas tanker came under attack after ignoring warnings but did not directly claim the assault. US benchmark crude added 56 cents to USD 69.11 a barrel. (AP) FHK GSP GSP