Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co will add two advanced chip packaging plants at the Chiayi Science Park, expanding to four facilities a southern Taiwan hub whose full buildout is expected to generate more than 300 billion Taiwan dollars in annual production value and over 9,000 jobs, as the demand from artificial intelligence chip designers like Nvidia continues to outstrip the supply of the advanced packaging that has become the binding constraint on the AI hardware buildout.

The groundbreaking, with the first Chiayi plant already in mass production and the second approaching it, illustrates the velocity of the capacity race in the chip-on-wafer-on-substrate technology that converts the world’s most advanced silicon into the accelerators powering the datacenter boom.

Copper edged higher as traders weighed the demand outlook against the renewed hostilities between the United States and Iran, a modest 0.3 percent rise to 13,524 dollars a ton that conceals the deepening tension between the metal’s healthy long-term fundamentals and the macroeconomic storm the war’s reignition threatens to unleash.

The latest flare-up, with Iranian forces launching retaliatory drone and missile assaults on the American allies in the region and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz almost nonexistent on Monday, has revived the inflation-and-rates transmission channel through which the Gulf conflict reaches the industrial metals: higher energy costs stoking inflation, inflation forcing rate hikes, and higher borrowing costs hampering the manufacturers whose demand copper serves.

China is creating a new state-backed investment vehicle to strengthen its control over overseas mineral resources as competition with the United States and Europe spreads from mines and processing plants into financing, project governance and relations with resource-rich countries. The initiative suggests that Beijing no longer believes the overseas expansion model used by a handful of large Chinese mining companies is sufficient for a more politically contested and commercially difficult era.

Guangyan International Investment, which also uses the English name Vast Rock International Investment, is expected to support Chinese companies pursuing mining projects abroad. Its role could range from direct equity investment to advice on regulatory compliance, political risk, market conditions and transaction structure.

China’s crude oil imports appear set to recover after several months of unusually weak buying, as refiners raise operating rates, restrictions on fuel exports are relaxed and discounted Middle Eastern cargoes become more widely available. The expected return of Chinese demand could provide an important source of support for global oil prices later this year, particularly if Beijing begins rebuilding the large inventories it drew down during the Iran war.

China has played two very different roles in the oil market over the past year. During periods of oversupply, it absorbed excess barrels and helped establish a floor under benchmark prices. When the conflict in the Middle East disrupted supply and sent physical crude costs sharply higher, Beijing moved in the opposite direction. It reduced purchases, lowered refinery throughput, restricted exports of refined fuels and allowed oil companies to draw from commercial and strategic inventories.

China’s temporary ban on helium exports is a defensive response to renewed conflict in the Middle East and the risk that disruptions to Qatari supply could leave Chinese semiconductor manufacturers without enough of a gas that is essential to advanced chip production. The restriction took effect immediately, indicating that Beijing is prioritizing domestic industrial continuity over the relatively small volumes of helium that Chinese companies normally sell to other Asian markets.

The decision is unusual because China is not a major net supplier of helium. It is heavily dependent on foreign sources, with imports estimated to cover about 85 percent of domestic requirements. Chinese companies export only limited surplus volumes when local availability exceeds immediate needs or when regional prices make overseas sales attractive.

Aluminium prices dropped sharply after Emirates Global Aluminium restarted its Al Taweelah alumina refinery in the United Arab Emirates, reinforcing expectations that Gulf metal supply will recover more quickly than the market had previously assumed. The restart ended an outage that lasted roughly three and a half months and provided a concrete sign that the regional production system damaged during the Iran conflict is beginning to return.

Benchmark three-month aluminium on the London Metal Exchange fell by almost 2 percent to around $3,143 a metric ton, after declining by more than 2 percent earlier in the session. The move reflected a renewed willingness among traders to sell price rallies as evidence accumulates that supply from both the Middle East and Indonesia could expand during the coming months.

Europe has kept its planes flying through imports from the United States and Asia, boosted refinery runs and inventory drawdowns, yet it remains the region most exposed to renewed disruption as the fragile truce buckles under fresh strikes, with less than thirty days of jet fuel demand cover leaving the continent operating on the thinnest cushion of any major market.

The projection of a nearly 600,000-barrel-per-day third-quarter deficit for Europe, against surpluses of 116,000 in the United States and 425,000 in Asia-Pacific, quantifies the structural imbalance that decades of refinery closures created and the Hormuz dependence exposed: Britain, France and Germany built their aviation fuel security on Middle Eastern shipments that the war severed and the truce’s collapse now threatens anew.

Asia’s LNG imports are poised to hit a six-month high in July while Europe’s plunge to their lowest in nearly two years, a divergence that reveals the transatlantic tug-of-war over the American cargoes that the renewed collapse of the US-Iran ceasefire has now supercharged.

The 23.05 million tons heading to Asia, up for a fourth straight month and six percent above both June and the year-earlier level, against the 6.90 million arriving in Europe, the weakest since September 2024, sketches a gas market in which the world’s two great importing regions are being forced into the direct competition for the same molecules just as the Qatari fifth of global supply slips back behind a closed strait.