Selling pressure on AI-related stocks, which had already unsettled equity markets globally, carried over into the Wall Street session as traders weighed whether the sector's recent expansion could hold its pace. Shares tied to artificial intelligence technologies posted a second consecutive session of losses.

By Thursday morning, the S&P 500 had shed half a percentage point while the Nasdaq composite retreated by 1.2 per cent. A gain of 269 points lifted the Dow Jones Industrial Average by session's end.

Nvidia's share price retreated 3.2 per cent on the day, while Advanced Micro Devices posted a steeper pullback of 5.4 per cent, with both chipmakers weighing on the broader technology segment. Shares in Nvidia slipped 1.6 per cent at the open, with Broadcom posting a similar decline, and Advanced Micro Devices shedding 3.1 per cent.

Shares in CoreWeave, a cloud-based provider of AI computing infrastructure, dropped a further 3.8 per cent in early trading, extending a 15.5 per cent retreat from the prior session — the steepest single-day loss the stock had recorded since February. Shares in GE Vernova, a company pursuing contracts to supply electricity to data centres, extended their retreat with a further 3.2 per cent fall, building on Wednesday's 6.2 per cent slide, while Oracle shed an additional 1.6 per cent on top of the nearly nine per cent it had already lost the session before.

Inflation concerns were putting pressure on high-growth technology shares in pre-market trading, with the U.S. earnings season drawing near. A separate data release pointed to consumer prices in the United States climbing by more than analysts had forecast. Producer prices climbed over the previous month, with higher energy costs accounting for much of the movement.

Inflation figures published Wednesday showed the annual pace of price growth still running above the Federal Reserve's two per cent benchmark, a situation that some analysts view as leaving room for another rate rise before the end of the year and that has weighed on equity markets. On Thursday, the producer price index — a federal gauge of wholesale costs — was published alongside a new round of earnings reports from corporations.

Ten-year bond yields pulled back to 5.09 per cent after touching 5.32 per cent, though the rate has yet to return to lower territory. Elevated borrowing costs, driven by rising bond yields, may narrow the financing options available to firms seeking to fund data centre construction and procure the AI chips needed to equip them.

Thursday's opening session on the Toronto Stock Exchange saw the benchmark index slip 0.2 per cent, while Celestica shares absorbed a steeper drop of nearly seven per cent.

Trading across Asian markets saw South Korea's Kospi — the country's primary equity index — shed 7.6 per cent, settling at 5,554.22. Over the past month, the index shed more than 16 per cent, leaving it well beneath the 9,000 threshold it had reached in June — a record level that formed during a period of broad investor enthusiasm surrounding artificial intelligence developments worldwide.

Shares in Samsung Electronics retreated 9.5 per cent, while those of fellow memory chipmaker SK Hynix gave up 11.1 per cent of their value.

The Nikkei 225 index in Tokyo shed 4.9 per cent of its value, closing at 64,425.95. Shares in SoftBank Group, which holds a stake in OpenAI, fell by 9.3 per cent. Shares in chip-equipment producer Tokyo Electron fell by 7.8 per cent, while Kioxia Holdings, which manufactures memory chips, recorded a steeper decline of 12.3 per cent.

The Taiex in Taiwan, a market that had ridden gains tied to artificial intelligence demand, posted a 3.4 per cent loss on the day. Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — TSMC, the territory's foremost chip producer — eased about two per cent in the run-up to the company's quarterly earnings release. TSMC posted a quarterly profit on Thursday that set a new record and came in above analyst forecasts, with the chipmaker noting that demand tied to artificial intelligence continues to hold at elevated levels.

Lorraine Tan, who leads equity research for Asia at Morningstar, pointed out that markets carrying heavy technology weightings — Korea and Taiwan in particular, and Japan to a lesser degree — face a potential vulnerability in that any pullback in expectations around AI-related spending could translate into softer demand for chips and equipment, with the underlying tension being a possible gap between what investors anticipate for technology-sector growth and what the data ultimately bears out.

Trading in Hong Kong pushed the Hang Seng index down to 24,062.72, a retreat of one per cent on the session. Trading on the Shanghai Composite ended with the index down 1.6 per cent, settling at a closing figure of 3,707.48. The S&P/ASX 200 index closed at 8,719.70, slipping fractionally by 0.1 per cent on the day.

By midday across European trading, London's FTSE 100 had added 0.7 per cent, while the Paris-based CAC 40 shed 0.3 per cent and Frankfurt's DAX slipped 0.4 per cent.

Crude prices retreated as a combination of unresolved supply questions and ongoing instability across the Middle East kept traders on edge. Priced at US$104.91 a barrel, Brent crude — the benchmark for global oil trading — shed just over one per cent of its value. Prices held above the roughly $72-a-barrel mark that had been in place before hostilities with Iran broke out toward the end of February. Domestic crude oil advanced 23 cents to settle at $95.32 per barrel.