Asia-Pacific markets mainly fall on the penultimate day of the year

Markets in the Asia-Pacific region mostly fell on Tuesday, after sales of technology products on Wall Street continued on AI bubble fears.

Nvidia stocks fell more than 1% on Monday in the United States, giving back some of their gain of more than 5% over the past week. Palantir Technologies And Metaplatforms also suffered losses, as did Oracle.

Australia S&P/ASX200 started the day up 0.19%.

from Japan Nikkei 225 was down 0.49%, while the broad-based Topix was down 0.36%.

Actions of Softbank Group Corp. slipped more than 2%, after the company announced a agreement Monday night it will buy a data center investment company Digital Bridge for $4 billion as part of its artificial intelligence campaign.

SoftBank CEO and Chairman Masayoshi Son said the acquisition will “strengthen the foundations of next-generation AI data centers” and advance the company’s vision of becoming a leading provider of “artificial super intelligence” platforms. DigitalBridge shares jumped about 10% after the announcement.

South Korea’s Kospi lost 0.41% and the small-cap Kosdaq lost 0.36%.

that of Hong Kong Hang Seng Index futures were at 25,603, slightly lower than the HSI’s last close of 25,635.23.

Investors will focus on Chinese military exercises around Taiwan, after the world’s second-largest economy announced new exercises around the island on Monday.

US futures were little changed in early Asian hours.

Overnight in the United States, the S&P500 fell by 0.35%, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 0.50%. THE Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 0.51%.

Traders will be looking for U.S. housing price data due Tuesday at 9 a.m. ET, as well as minutes from the Federal Reserve’s December meeting at 2 p.m. ET.

—CNBC’s Sean Conlon and Fred Imbert contributed to this report.