London Metal Exchange base metals fell across the board in the week ended 2 October, with aluminium down 5.1 percent and copper down 2.5 percent, although copper's nearby spread flipped to a premium and exchange stocks stay heavily earmarked.
A Reuters poll of 30 economists raised the 2026 Brent average to $89.05 a barrel from $85.08 a month earlier as shipments through the Strait of Hormuz stay impaired, while OPEC+ is expected to leave output targets unchanged at its Sunday meeting.
US corn inventories on September 1 came in at 2.095 billion bushels, 35% above a year earlier and well above trade expectations, sending December corn to a five-week low near $5.00. At the same time nitrogen costs firmed, with urea quoted at $796.25 a short ton and anhydrous ammonia at $945.00.
AMD has laid out its biggest EPYC lineup yet on TSMC 2nm, with up to 256 Zen 6c cores, 16 memory channels and MRDIMM support at 12,800 MT/s for 1.6TB/s of bandwidth. Power envelopes climb to 600W as AMD splits the family between a large SP7 socket and a mainstream SP8 socket.
South Korean foundry DB HiTek has raised prices by as much as 30%, with Chinese customers facing the steepest increases as orders push 8-inch capacity toward full utilization. TSMC is meanwhile weighing a multi-fab Texas campus that could add tens of billions of dollars to its US expansion.
Micron's Taiwan investment has topped NT$1.6 trillion with a second HBM advanced packaging plant in Taichung due online in October 2026 and expansion underway in Tongluo, Taoyuan and Tainan. Nanya Technology won approval for a Pingtung advanced packaging site, and Micron has told suppliers capacity will be tighter in 2027 and 2028 than in 2026.
The COMEX European duty-paid aluminium premium jumped 10% to $574 a tonne, the highest since June, on fears a US tariff cut on Canadian metal would divert supply. Separately, China's antitrust regulator is demanding copper concentrate supply commitments as a condition for approving Anglo American's $54 billion Teck merger.
The G7 and partner governments agreed to release as much as 100 million barrels of emergency diesel and crude over four months through the IEA. European gasoil futures fell more than 4% and Brent slid about $3 to below $100, while the diesel crack over crude narrowed to roughly $69 a barrel.
Moscow has proposed higher taxes on excess profits in the metals and fertilizer sectors on the back of elevated global prices, while US phosphate and nitrogen quotes remain historically firm and physical urea availability is still dictated by what can move through the Strait of Hormuz.
AMD's next-generation EPYC 9006 family is fragmenting into a high-power SP7 flagship tier up to 256 cores, a broader SP8 tier from 8 to 128 cores and an LPDDR5X host processor aimed directly at rack-scale AI designs, while ODMs report rack-level system integration climbing to 18% of revenue.
South Korean foundry DB HiTek has raised prices by as much as 30% as Chinese orders push its 8-inch lines close to full utilisation, while packaging specialists from Shinko Electric to JCET accelerate capacity additions aimed at AI accelerators.
LME base metals closed lower across the board on October 1, with three-month copper at $14,289 a tonne, as a stronger dollar and high energy costs weighed on prices even as unions at the Escondida, Centinela and Padcal copper mines all moved toward strike action within a single week.
TrendForce's latest quarterly outlook puts conventional DRAM contract prices up 10-15% quarter on quarter in 4Q26 and NAND Flash up 15-20%, with enterprise solid-state drives the only memory product whose rate of increase is expected to accelerate as cloud providers build out AI inference capacity.
Crude benchmarks posted their largest single-day gain in weeks on October 1, with ICE Brent settling at $102.31 and NYMEX WTI at $92.87, after Washington confirmed a third aircraft carrier strike group and up to 10,000 additional troops for the Middle East while Chinese refiners cancelled October gasoline and jet fuel cargoes.
A five-year lease for about 100,000 advanced accelerators across Southeast Asian data centres shows how Chinese buyers route around export controls, converting scarce GPU capacity into contracted cloud capacity instead of hardware purchases.
A 256% jump in full-year revenue, an 87% quarterly gross margin and a first-ever $100 billion DRAM year were driven by pricing rather than volume, and management now expects the memory market to be supply-constrained through 2028.
HBM4 volumes are doing double duty at Samsung, generating logic-foundry revenue through the 4nm base die, lifting utilisation enough to support higher contract prices and cut projected 2026 foundry losses by more than 40%.
USDA weekly data showed a sharp rebound in soybean export inspections, but CBOT grains fell after reports that Beijing's tariff on US soybeans survives while the broader US-China package covers other farm goods.
LME copper held firm and was set for a third straight monthly gain on better Chinese factory activity and shrinking Shanghai inventories, while aluminium extended losses to its weakest since late July and Escondida strike risk added a fresh supply question.
Crude fell back this week as tanker-tracking data showed Middle East exports recovering toward pre-war volumes, even as refined-product markets stayed far tighter than crude and Washington kept a diesel export ban on the table.