Mainland and Hong Kong tech shares slid in early trading on Friday, joining a global sell-off

The benchmark Hang Seng Index lost 375 points, or 1.45 percent, to open at 25,460. The Hang Seng Tech Index slid up to 3.1 percent to a three-month low; on track for the sixth-straight session of decline

Alibaba was down 3.5 percent while Baidu fell nearly 6 percent.

Up north, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index opened down 0.87 percent at 3,896 while the Shenzhen Component Index was 1.76 percent lower at 12,752 and the ChiNext Index, tracking China's Nasdaq-style board of growth enterprises, was down 2.07 percent at 2,979.

China's CSI AI Index weakened as much as 3 percent to the lowest level since September 10. The CSI Semiconductor Index was down 2.9 percent to a two-month low.

Japanese and South Korean tech stocks plummeted, with tech investor SoftBank plunging more than 10 percent as fears over an AI bubble weighed on the market.

The selling followed a downbeat session on Wall Street after US jobs data clouded hopes of further interest rate cuts and fears about whether red-hot valuations for artificial intelligence shares are justified.

Seoul's benchmark Kospi index was trading down nearly 4 percent while Tokyo's Nikkei index shed 2.3 percent in morning trade.

Samsung Electronics sank 4.8 percent and rival SK Hynix plunged more than 9 percent. The firms are two of the world's leading memory chip makers.

The downturn comes a day after a region-wide rally fuelled by an earnings report from AI bellwether Nvidia, which topped expectations on fierce demand for advanced chips.

"For now, movements in the domestic [South Korean] market are inevitably tied to day swings in US tech stocks, including Nasdaq futures and Nvidia's after-hours trading," said Han Ji-young, an analyst from Kiwoom Securities. "Nvidia's earnings were undeniably a surprise, but in a time of heightened short-term volatility, even strong catalysts struggle to generate meaningful upside," he added.

Japan's SoftBank Group, a major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, tumbled as much as 10.7 percent in early trade.

SoftBank, OpenAI and cloud giant Oracle are jointly leading the US$500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the United States announced by President Donald Trump in January.

SPI Asset Management's Stephen Innes said there was no "single catalyst" for the stock routs.

"What we saw was the market hitting a psychological air pocket – the kind of reversal every veteran trader has lived through, yet cannot reasonably quantify or make sense of in real time," he said. "Japan, Korea, Australia all opened on the defensive, with traders fully aware that the Nvidia-led optimism evaporated before the US lunch hour." (Agencies/Xinhua)