According to Yonhap, the Hong Kong Economic Times and Taiwan's Central News Agency, Asian equities opened mostly higher on Thursday after Nvidia's forecast-beating results reignited AI-chip demand optimism, though early gains proved uneven across the region.

Tokyo's Nikkei 225 opened firmer at 66,775.78, but the advance faded quickly and the index turned lower, trading at 66,024.19, down 0.36% or 237.97 points as of 01:41 UTC. Chip-related names were mixed, with Advantest down 2.61% and Tokyo Electron off 0.58%, while Sony held near flat. Kioxia plans to invest 6.27 billion dollars in a new memory facility in Japan, according to a Nikkei report.

Seoul's KOSPI opened sharply higher, rising 187.91 points to 6,996.12, while the KOSDAQ added 1.55 points to 828.42. The Bank of Korea delivered a back-to-back interest-rate increase of 25 basis points, in line with expectations. Chipmakers advanced, with SK Hynix up 1.72% and Samsung Electronics up 0.67% in early trade.

Hong Kong stocks opened higher, with the Hang Seng Index up 121 points at 25,774 on turnover of 7.29 billion Hong Kong dollars, while the Hang Seng Tech Index rose 0.8% to 4,665. AI model developers led gains, with MINIMAX up nearly 5% after results and Zhipu (02513) rising more than 8% after saying its "Niulai" model runs entirely on domestically made chips. Sunny Optical gained about 4% following its interim results. Baidu will convert to a dual-primary listing on the Hong Kong exchange effective September 1.

Taiwan's TAIEX opened up 57.56 points at 45,890.18 and quickly extended gains, reaching as high as 46,390.93 in early trade. TSMC rose as much as 0.83% to 2,435 New Taiwan dollars, Hon Hai climbed more than 2% to 253, and MediaTek briefly topped 4,000 to a high of 4,005, up 1.52%. Memory names rallied, with Nanya Technology up more than 4% and Winbond up over 3%.

In mainland China, the major indexes opened mixed, with the Shanghai Composite down 0.02%, the Shenzhen Component up 0.26%, the ChiNext up 0.67% and the STAR Market composite up 0.86%. Semiconductor and computing-hardware supply-chain shares strengthened, with CPO and PCB names leading, while gold and coal stocks pulled back. Dolphin Microsystems opened more than 17% higher after signing enterprise PCIe SSD sales orders worth about 3.49 billion yuan.