Seoul, June 2 (IANS) South Korean stocks traded lower late on Tuesday morning as investors rushed to cash out market heavyweights, bucking overnight gains on Wall Street.

Opening a tad higher, the benchmark Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) was down 188.63 points, or 2.15 percent, to 8,599.75 as of 11:20 am (local time), reports Yonhap news agency.

Overnight, U.S. stocks finished higher, with major indexes reaching fresh record highs as a rally in tech shares lifted market sentiment.

U.S. chip giant Nvidia surged more than 6 percent after CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a new AI processor designed to run local agentic AI applications on personal computers.

Oil held gains as Washington struggled to get efforts toward an Iran peace deal back on track. U.S. President Donald Trump said talks with Iran were progressing at a rapid pace.

In Seoul, most large-cap shares traded in negative territory.

Market bellwether Samsung Electronics edged up 0.93 percent, while its rival chipmaker SK hynix fell 2.59 percent.

Top automaker Hyundai Motor shed 4.93 percent, and electronic components maker Samsung Electro-Mechanics plunged 11.82 percent.

Defence firm Hanwha Aerospace retreated 6.41 percent after the defence company said it was ordered to suspend operations at its Daejeon factory following a deadly explosion on Monday.

The Korean won was trading at 1,516.25 won against the U.S. dollar at 11:20 a.m., down 11.95 won from the previous session.

Meanwhile, the cloud subsidiary of Naver will join hands with Nvidia Corp. to build an artificial intelligence (AI) factory, the chief of the South Korean company said on Tuesday.

Kim Yu-won, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Naver Cloud, made the remarks at the Nvidia Cloud Partners Summit ongoing in Taipei as the U.S. chip giant’s chief Jensen Huang is set to visit Seoul later this week.

“Naver Cloud holds ‘full-stack’ technical capabilities encompassing all areas spanning from AI infrastructure to services,” Kim said at the event. “We are a partner that fits with Nvidia’s AI factory platform strategy, which includes energy, chips, infrastructure, application and models.”

An AI factory refers to next-generation AI infrastructure designed to train and run large-scale AI models and apply them to real-world services and industrial settings.

—IANS

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