Global equity markets kicked off Thursday with a split performance, as a tech-driven rally across most major Asian exchanges failed to lift European stocks, which opened lower following a solid rebound on Wall Street a day earlier. Volatility in crude oil pricing also continued to shape market sentiment across regions.
Across Northeast Asia, technology stocks delivered explosive gains, fueled primarily by a blowout quarterly report from AI chip giant Nvidia, whose results handily outstripped Wall Street consensus forecasts. In South Korea, the benchmark Kospi index skyrocketed 8.4% to close at 7,815.59, building on its recent streak that pushed the index above the 8,000 threshold for the first time in its history. The surge was led by domestic tech heavyweights: Samsung Electronics climbed 8.5% after management and its labor union finalized a last-minute agreement late Wednesday that avoided a strike that analysts warned would have carried significant financial costs for the firm. SK Hynix, a major memory chip producer that partners with Nvidia on AI hardware, notched an even steeper 11.2% jump.
Nvidia’s own first-quarter earnings revealed explosive year-over-year growth, with profit surging more than 200% and revenue climbing 85% in the three months ending in April. The firm has emerged as one of the largest corporate beneficiaries of the global AI boom, with unrelenting customer demand for its high-end AI processing chips driving its spectacular growth. Ahead of its official earnings release on Wednesday, Nvidia’s stock gained 1.3% during regular trading, but pulled back 1.3% in after-hours trading following the announcement.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 also posted strong gains, rising 3.1% to 61,684.14, after government data showed Japanese exports grew nearly 15% year-over-year in April, defying expectations that the ongoing conflict in Iran would weigh on trade. Like in South Korea, Japanese tech and chip-related stocks led the advance: semiconductor equipment manufacturer Tokyo Electron climbed 5.9%, while testing firm Advantest gained 4.4%. The tech-heavy Taiex index in Taiwan also climbed 3.9%, with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) gaining 3% on the back of strong AI chip demand. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 1.5% to close at 8,621.70, rounding out gains across most of the Asia-Pacific. Not all Chinese markets moved lower: Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 1.2% to 25,352.82, while the mainland Shanghai Composite dropped a sharper 2% to 4,077.28. In Indonesia, the benchmark index declined 3.3% as investors adjusted to a new government policy that places exports of strategic natural resources, including coal, under state control.
Against this backdrop of broad Asian gains, European markets opened in negative territory on Thursday. Germany’s DAX index dipped 0.3% to 24,669.59 in early trading, while Paris’s CAC 40 slipped 0.2% to 8,102.25. The FTSE 100 in the United Kingdom shed 0.4% to 10,393.56. U.S. equity futures also pointed to a soft open stateside, with S&P 500 futures down 0.3% and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures off 0.2%.
Oil prices rebounded early Thursday, one day after a 5% drop for international benchmark Brent crude. Brent gained $1.46 to trade at $106.48 per barrel, while the U.S. domestic benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude added $1.53 to hit $99.79 per barrel. Even with the pullback earlier this week, Brent remains far above its pre-conflict level of roughly $70 per barrel. Prices have seesawed in recent weeks as investors shift between optimism and pessimism over the prospect of a diplomatic deal between the United States and Iran that would fully resume Iranian oil exports to global markets.
The prior trading day on Wall Street delivered broad gains, ending a three-day losing streak for major indexes. The S&P 500 gained 1.1%, the Dow added 1.3%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite rallied 1.5%. The rally was supported by an easing in 10-year U.S. Treasury yields, which fell to 4.57% from 4.67% on Tuesday – a substantial shift for a bond market that moves in incremental hundredths of a percentage point. Yields had climbed steadily from less than 4% before the outbreak of the Iran conflict, as investors priced in risks that sustained high oil prices would keep inflation elevated. High yields act as a drag on economic growth and push down valuations for most assets from stocks to cryptocurrencies; they also raise borrowing costs for mortgages and corporate investment, including the construction of AI data centers that have been a key driver of recent U.S. economic growth.
Lower bond yields lifted all sectors, but technology stocks led the advance on Wall Street. Rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices jumped 8.1%, while Intel gained 7.4%. Small-cap stocks, which are more sensitive to borrowing costs than large established firms, posted even stronger gains: the Russell 2000 index of small U.S. companies surged 2.6%, more than doubling the gain of the large-cap S&P 500. Overall, most large U.S. companies have reported better-than-expected profits for the first quarter of 2026, a trend that has supported major indexes in hitting repeated record highs, aligned with the long-term trend of stock prices tracking corporate earnings growth. In currency markets, the U.S. dollar edged up slightly to 159.05 Japanese yen from 158.92, while the euro slipped marginally to $1.1601 from $1.1624.