Bank of Japan Policy Board Member: Cautious, gradual interest rate hikes may be needed at some stage in the future.

U.S. Special Envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Russia on Thursday, and will hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin as they work to broker a peace deal to end the Ukraine conflict.

Macquarie Group foreign exchange and interest rate strategist Thierry Wizman noted in a report that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s December meeting is still some time away, and numerous variables could emerge in the interim that would hinder the Fed from raising interest rates, though the current baseline expectation is a 25 basis point rate hike. Multiple factors could lead the Fed to forgo a December rate hike, or at minimum rule out a 50 basis point increase. The factors he cited include: a U.S. government shutdown, further declines in oil prices due to easing geopolitical tensions, and a further sell-off in U.S. equities if AI-related prospects deteriorate.

According to Bitget market data, South Korea’s KOSPI index closed 32.44 points lower on Thursday, November 12, with a 0.6% decline, ending at 5,342.92 points.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. reported quarterly profit that exceeded analyst expectations, driven by the AI boom and strong consumer demand for its $2,000 dual-screen iPhone. For the three months ended September, net profit rose 34% to NT$77.5 billion, versus the average analyst estimate of NT$70.3 billion. Hon Hai aims to capture half of the AI server market share within two years, and plans to boost its gross profit margin to around 10% by producing more high-value components.

Insight Beating AI Flash News: The Trump administration is finalizing new AI chip export control rules, set to restrict Chinese AI firms from remotely using advanced chips like NVIDIA’s Blackwell via overseas data centers. The new rules could be announced as early as this month and are still undergoing inter-agency coordination. The rules will add Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Norway, Brazil, and South Africa to a stricter chip export licensing regime. Data centers operated by non-U.S. local firms will need to apply to the U.S. for licenses to import controlled AI chips such as NVIDIA’s Blackwell and the latest Rubin, while disclosing equipment recipients and end uses, and will be subject to ongoing supervision. Data centers operated by U.S. firms will receive conditional exemptions. As long as they ban remote use of the relevant advanced chips by countries subject to U.S. arms embargoes like China and Russia, these data centers do not need to apply for separate licenses for importing such chips. However, they still must report the identities of clients from those countries and the scale of computing power they use. Previously, Chinese AI firms could not directly import some advanced chips, but they still rented GPU computing power via overseas data centers. Recently, NVIDIA was reportedly requiring overseas cloud service providers to allocate at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese clients, and Oracle was also reported to have canceled a roughly $7 billion computing power lease with Tencent under U.S. government pressure. The U.S. now plans to directly restrict overseas data centers from providing advanced computing power to Chinese firms through export licenses and client reporting systems. Facing the risk of tightened policies, Chinese cloud service providers and AI labs are stepping up bookings for overseas NVIDIA computing power.

According to monitoring by OnchainLens, India’s long-standing cryptocurrency exchange Unocoin reported unauthorized server access on November 9 and temporarily disabled user login functionality. Holdings of approximately 81,000 tracked addresses all show zero, while Unocoin’s official website is currently returning a 504 error.