TOKYO, Nov 4, (AP): Asian shares retreated Tuesday despite the big lift in overseas markets from optimism over AI technology, as traders sold shares to lock in recent profits. Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 dipped 1.7% to 51,497.20 following a national holiday on Monday. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 shed 0.9% to 8,813.70. South Korea's Kospi dipped 2.4% to 4,121.74, reversing after a rally took it to record highs in recent days. Hong Kong's Hang Seng erased earlier gains to fall 0.6% to 25,983.29, while the Shanghai Composite lost 0.4% to 3,960.19.

On Monday, gains for Nvidia, Amazon and other AI superstars propped up share prices. The S&P 500 rose 0.2% and pulled closer to its all-time high set last week, even though the majority of stocks in the index sank. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 226 points, or 0.5%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.5%.

Nvidia was the strongest force lifting the S&P 500, as it has been for much of the year so far. The chip company rose 2.2% to bring its gain for the year to date to 54.1%. Amazon was the No. 2 force pushing the market higher. It rallied 4% after announcing a $38 billion agreement with OpenAI, which will use Amazon’s cloud computing services to run its AI workloads.

IREN, an AI cloud service provider, jumped 11.5% after Microsoft announced a $9.7 billion contract with it that will give the tech giant access to some of Nvidia’s chips. Palantir Technologies, which came into the day with a stunning 165% gain for the year so far, rose another 3.3%. Traders pushed the AI darling higher in the final hours before the data platform company reported its latest quarterly results after trading closed for the day.

Companies across the US stock market will need to hit expectations for growth in profit to justify the big gains for their stock prices since April. Criticism has been rising that the broad US market, and AI stocks in particular, have become too expensive and could be inflating into a dangerous bubble similar to the 2000 dot-com bust.