A surge in tech stocks helped fuel gains in Asia and Europe, but Wall Street wobbled as a partial US government shutdown entered a second day.

While both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite pushed higher from record closes at the opening bell, those gains faded and Wall Street was mostly lower in late morning trading.

The trading day started off positively in Asia, with tech stocks surging as South Korea’s biggest chip firms agreed to supply chips and other equipment to OpenAI’s Stargate project for AI infrastructure.

South Korea’s Kospi index climbed 2.7 percent to a record high, thanks to Samsung and SK hynix shares soaring to one-year highs after the firms signed a preliminary deal with the ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

Tokyo rose, as did Hong Kong’s tech-heavy Hang Seng index. Shanghai wa

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