Live updates on Asian markets: Consumer Price Index Japan, Nvidia results

Samsung Electronics shares fell 2.3% after Reuters reported that the South Korean tech giant's latest high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips were not yet ready for use by U.S. chipmaker Nvidia.

Three people familiar with the problem told Reuters that Samsung's chips were experiencing problems with heat generation and power consumption.

The problems are related to the company's fourth generation of HBM3 chips (most commonly used in graphics processors for AI) as well as the next generation of HBM3E chips that Samsung and its competitors are launching this year, the report said.

Samsung shares weighed on the broader Kospi, which fell 1.05 percent.

Nvidia reported late Wednesday that its first-quarter revenue more than tripled and its data center business grew 427% year-over-year.

— Shreyashi Sanyal

Nvidia delivered once again and the results showed that there are no signs of slowing down.

The chipmaker's shares jumped in extended trading, but given the “overwhelming results,” Nancy Tengler of Laffer Tengler Investments said she had expected the price to move even higher.

“I think a lot of this is already priced in, and now you'll see how it impacts other players in the space as well,” the investment chief told CNBC's “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.

“We believe there is another way to play this,” she said.

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— Weizhen Tan

Traders are again lowering their expectations for the number of interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve this year and pushing back the outlook for the first cut even further.

A day after minutes from the Fed's last meeting confirmed that policymakers are concerned about inflation and in no rush to cut rates, traders in the Fed Funds Futures market reduced their forecast to just one cut in 2024. The probability of a single cut rose to nearly 58 percent, according to CME Group's FedWatch tool. Earlier this week, the market was expecting two cuts.

At the same time, the first downtrend is expected to occur in September at the earliest and more likely in November. At the beginning of the year, traders had priced in at least six rate cuts starting in March. The probability of a rate cut in September fell to 51% on Thursday afternoon.

—Jeff Cox

As the first-quarter earnings season draws to a close, SimCorp says investors will be paying more attention to geopolitical issues in the coming months ahead of the next round of earnings reports.

“The Fed has made it pretty clear that they are not going to cut rates, so there is no question of 'Are they going to cut rates or not?' [scenario] has everyone on their toes. We're going to see a shift on some of these geopolitical issues, whether it's the elections or the two wars that are going on,” said Melissa Brown, executive director of applied research.

Events such as the elections in the US and UK do not necessarily have an impact on the economy, but they do increase uncertainty, Brown noted.

“People could go from 'I'll just buy now' to 'Look, I'll wait and see what happens before I decide to put more money into the market,'” Brown said.

— Hakyung Kim