ASIA MIDDAY MOVES | Chip Stocks Drag Seoul Down 2.6% and Tokyo Lower at Midday; Hong Kong Bucks Trend

According to HKET, RTHK and Yonhap, Asian equities were mostly lower at midday on Monday as chipmakers sold off after weekend comments from Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI leaders backing a slower pace of frontier-model development, though Hong Kong recovered from early losses. Figures below are Google Finance snapshots as of 04:32 UTC unless attributed to a media report. Tokyo's Nikkei 225 traded at 63,346.48, down 664.86 points or 1.04%. RTHK reported the index briefly slid as much as 1,285 points to a low of 62,726 before regaining the 63,000 level, ending the morning session down 512 points or 0.8% at 63,498. Chip-related names weighed, with Advantest off 3.22% and Tokyo Electron down 0.87%, while Sony rose 3.25%. Seoul's KOSPI was the region's weakest, at 6,732.86, down 177.05 points or 2.56%, after falling more than 3% intraday. Memory makers led the retreat, with SK Hynix down 5.35% and Samsung Electronics off 2.79%, as investors weighed whether a slowdown in AI-model iteration could crimp demand for GPUs and high-bandwidth memory. Hong Kong stocks reversed early weakness to close the morning higher. The Hang Seng Index rose 87 points or 0.35% to 24,893.11 by the lunch break on turnover of HK$107.02 billion, after dropping as much as 143 points to 24,662 early on, while the Hang Seng Tech Index added 0.2% to 4,327. Lenovo gained more than 4% and Xiaomi rose about 3%, with WuXi Biologics and WuXi AppTec both up more than 4%; Zhipu fell over 7% after a placement and convertible-bond raise totalling about HK$39.3 billion, and MiniMax dropped nearly 5%. Taiwan's TAIEX stood at 45,936.33, down 248.52 points or 0.54%, paring an early plunge of nearly 690 points that had briefly pushed the index below 46,000 and its monthly line. TSMC fell 1.04% to NT$2,385, while MediaTek was little changed at NT$4,580 and Hon Hai edged up 0.40% to NT$249. In mainland China, the Shanghai Composite reversed early losses to trade up 6.17 points or 0.16% at 3,894.28 by midday, while the CSI 300 eased 0.32% to 4,495.92.