CBOT soybeans and wheat firmed while corn slipped as the US harvest reached 18% for corn and 17% for soybeans, even as US fertilizer benchmarks diverged sharply, with DAP up $202.48 on the week and urea down $39.18.
NVIDIA launched a DSX Ready qualification program covering battery energy storage and cooling distribution units, formalising the power and thermal supply chain for rack-scale AI factories while GPU availability remains tight for smaller buyers.
Global Foundry 2.0 market revenue reached a record $96.6 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 25% year-on-year and 11% sequentially, as data-center demand broadened from leading-edge logic into networking, power management, mature nodes and packaging.
TrendForce now expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 10-15% quarter-on-quarter and NAND flash 15-20% in the fourth quarter, with hyperscaler demand for QLC enterprise SSDs driving an outsized 23-28% sequential jump.
LME three-month copper steadied near $14,446 a tonne after workers at Antofagasta's Centinela mine voted to strike, compounding a supply squeeze that has pushed the metal toward a third consecutive monthly gain of about 9% in September.
Crude steadied at the end of a volatile month after Washington signalled it will not ease sanctions on Iran, leaving Brent around $103 a barrel even as Kpler data showed Persian Gulf loadings recovering to roughly 77% of pre-war throughput.
US retail fertilizer prices rose for six of eight major nutrients in the second full week of September, with anhydrous ammonia running 22% above a year earlier, while heavy rain across the western corn and soybean belts complicates the start of harvest and the fall application schedule.
NVIDIA's Rubin-generation rack designs shown by ASUS in Seoul move eight GPUs into a single 1U liquid-cooled tray and push fans out of the chassis entirely, a density shift that raises demand for cold plates, manifolds and CDUs. Component-level pricing is splitting, with AI-server MLCCs rising while general-purpose passives fall.
TSMC's 3nm, 2nm and CoWoS advanced packaging capacity remain in short supply in late 3Q26, with AWS Annapurna taking more 3nm wafers and MediaTek's Google TPU programme forcing a revision of its allocation. Supply-chain sources say wafer-out prices will rise 3-6% from January 2027, with advanced nodes at the top of the range.
TrendForce sees 2027 NAND demand bifurcating, with enterprise SSD contract prices continuing to rise on North American cloud buying while consumer NAND weakens under new Chinese capacity and specification downgrades. At the same time the research house has sharply raised its 2027 HBM price forecast on tight supply and a richer HBM4 mix.
LME copper fell as much as 1.6% to about $14,343 a tonne on softer Chinese industrial profit data, its weakest since 17 September, yet the cash-to-three-month spread has flipped into a roughly $65 a tonne backwardation and half of LME warehouse stocks are already earmarked for delivery.
West Texas Intermediate is trading about $12 a barrel below Brent, the widest discount of the year, as Washington weighs a temporary diesel export ban that analysts warn would force US refiners to cut crude runs by roughly 2 million barrels a day. European gas slid more than 8% on the week on renewed US-Iran diplomacy, but EU storage still trails last year by 12 percentage points.
USDA meteorologists flagged heavy rain across western corn and soybean belts, while US fertilizer benchmarks showed urea easing to $730 a short ton even as DAP jumped more than 26% over 90 days, and StoneX argued an energy shock is now reshaping grain demand.
NVIDIA's new DSX Ready programme certifies third-party battery energy storage and coolant distribution units against its AI factory reference design, launching with Tesla, Hitachi Energy and LG Energy Solution on power and Vertiv, LiquidStack and LG Electronics on cooling.
TSMC's leading-edge nodes and CoWoS advanced packaging remained in short supply through the third quarter as customer orders and front-end/back-end supply models shifted, while the foundry works to raise monthly CoWoS output to roughly 120,000-140,000 wafers by late 2026.
TrendForce's DRAM spot board showed DDR5 16Gb averaging $57.667 on September 24 while DDR5 32GB RDIMMs jumped 7.9% to $2,050, and the NAND market is splitting as AI-driven enterprise SSD contract prices rise on QLC demand even as wafer spot prices stay weak on soft consumer buying.
Benchmark LME copper ended the week near $14,632 a tonne, up 0.48%, after touching a record $14,875 on September 10, while Comex warehouses held 69% of the roughly 1 million tonnes tracked by global exchanges and imported concentrate treatment charges stayed at minus $224.53 per dry metric tonne.
ICE Brent climbed above $107 a barrel on Monday after Washington rejected Tehran's Hormuz proposal, while WTI lagged near $94 as a possible US diesel export ban threatened refinery run rates and pushed the Brent-WTI spread to the widest of the crisis.
Wiwynn opened a US$1.6 billion AI server plant in Socorro, Texas, while Google Cloud's CEO said in-house silicon pays for itself in about a year. PwC and Oxford Economics project US$31.6 trillion of cumulative global data centre capex by 2050, with power emerging as the binding constraint.
TrendForce's September bulletins describe a DRAM market where AI infrastructure demand is displacing consumer supply and long-term agreements lock out smaller buyers. PC and mobile brands are cutting output or exiting low-margin lines, while QLC demand lifts enterprise SSD contract prices even as NAND spot stays weak.