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Trade Wars
Nippon Steel’s $2.5 Billion Gamble on Mon Valley: Resetting the Sheet Metal Supply Chain
A $2.5 billion investment from Tokyo-based Nippon Steel is breathing new life into U.S. Steel’s Mon Valley Works in western Pennsylvania, with impacts set to ripple across the sheet metal and HVAC supply chain. The company’s commitment to overhaul the historic Edgar Thomson plant is remarkable for both its scale – up to 6,000 jobs created and $1.7 billion in regional economic impact – and its timing, coming as U.S. industrial policy, tariffs, and global trade tensions force a rethink of domestic manufacturing.
U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt has been candid about what made this possible, saying “these investments would not have been able to happen without [Nippon Steel].” Just two years ago, U.S. Steel warned it might shut down the Mon Valley plant and move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh. Today, the same facility is poised to be a linchpin for domestic flat-rolled steel production for decades to come, reviving an industrial legacy that once defined the region.
Read more at SNIPs News
Micron Revenue More Than Quadruples As AI Boom Leads To Soaring Memory Prices
Micron’s revenue more than quadrupled in the fiscal third quarter, the company said on Wednesday, as the memory maker continued to benefit from soaring demand tied to the artificial intelligence boom. The stock rose about 5% in extended trading. Revenue was $41.46 billion versus $35.84 billion estimated and earnings per share were: $25.11, adjusted, versus $20.78 estimated. Revenue increased from $9.3 billion a year earlier, Micron said in a statement.
For the current quarter, the company said it expects revenue of about $50 billion, up from $11.3 billion a year earlier. Analysts were looking for a revenue forecast of $43.58 billion, according to LSEG. Memory prices have skyrocketed in the last couple years as AI chips eat up all the production capacity of the small crop of vendors. With data center demand increasing by the day, prices are also rising for memory used in smartphones, laptops and other gadgets.
Read more at CNBC
Boeing Wins $2 Billion Space Force Contract For Communications Satellites
Boeing won a contract worth up to $2 billion to build two next-generation military communications satellites for the U.S. Space Force, prevailing over Lockheed Martin in a competition to extend the life of one of the Pentagon’s most heavily used satellite networks. The contract covers the design, development, production and testing of two satellites for the Mobile User Objective System, or MUOS, the military’s primary narrowband communications constellation. The satellites are to be delivered by 2035, according to a June 23 contract announcement.
Lockheed Martin built all five satellites currently operating in the MUOS constellation. Boeing and Lockheed Martin had been competing head-to-head under the Space Force’s MUOS Service Life Extension program, which was launched after the service assumed responsibility for the network from the Navy in 2023. MUOS connects troops, ships, aircraft and special operations forces through a network of satellites in geostationary orbit. Often described as a cellphone network in space, the system allows users equipped with relatively small terminals to communicate far beyond the reach of terrestrial networks.
Read more at Space News
Report: Industrial AI Has Transitioned To The ‘Application Phase’
The industrial market has transitioned out of the “infrastructure phase” of AI and into the “application phase.” In analyzing the results of Smart Industry’s Industrial AI, Energy, and Robotics Survey, the data proves that the traditional “fast-follower” strategy is effectively dead for productive AI adoption. The survey shows that we have reached a powerful catalyst—a structural convergence where accelerated hardware primitives, enterprise software canvases, and physical context are beginning to interact, dividing the market along a noticeable operational fault line.
The research shows that the global industrial market has fractured into three distinct operational cohorts:
- The pacesetters (12.9%): Elite industry leaders that have stopped treating AI as a siloed IT experiment, successfully decoupling their core data from software applications to deploy autonomous optimization loops across their facilities.
- The mainstream (55.3%): The traveling majority seeking solid operational traction yet remaining largely trapped in basic conversational copilots and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) document summaries that fail to deliver meaningful value.
- The laggards (31.8%): A trailing cohort feeling increasingly left behind, stalled by legacy technical debt, custom codebase traps, and fragmented data silos.
Read more at Reuters
OpenAI Unveils First Chip As Part Of Broadcom Deal In Effort To ‘Build The Full Stack’
OpenAI and Broadcom on Wednesday unveiled their debut custom chip, called Jalapeño, marking the ChatGPT maker’s first entry into artificial intelligence silicon. The chips will be made by Broadcom and used by OpenAI for inference, the compute-intensive process of serving its AI models to users in ChatGPT and other applications. It’s a major step in OpenAI’s plan to “build the full stack behind its models and products,” according to the press release.
In October, after 18 months spent working together, OpenAI and Broadcom went public with plans to develop and deploy racks of OpenAI-designed chips starting late this year, ultimately aiming to build enough to require 10 gigawatts of power. The chip with Broadcom is an ASIC, which industry experts say is less flexible than Nvidia’s GPU, but is also less expensive and can be designed for specific AI tasks. The companies are calling the chip an “Intelligence Processor” and describe it as the first “AI accelerator” in a platform they’re building “to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people.”
Read more at CNBC
Honda Reviving Boxy Element In 2029 As A Hybrid To Battle Ford Bronco Sport
Honda plans to resurrect the Element, a quirky compact crossover that gained a cult following for its versatility and unique looks, as a hybrid targeting the booming lifestyle and adventure market. The success of the refreshed Passport apparently has Honda thinking that boxy SUVs are back in style. “People with knowledge of the plan” have told Automotive News that Honda will begin second-generation Element production in 2029, specifically in the second quarter. That means the new SUV will likely go on sale as a 2030 model.
The report says that Honda plans to produce the new Element in Ohio, which will serve as the global production hub for the model. It will allegedly slot between the HR-V and CR-V in the lineup. The automaker expects to produce nearly 100,000 SUVs. Honda built the first-gen Element from 2003 to 2011. It wasn’t the commercial success the automaker had hoped for, but it has become a cult classic for its innovative features and design and has garnered a rabid following.
Read more at Motor1
Toyota Cuts Output Due to Supply Disruptions
Toyota Motors plans to reduce its production volume by 100,000 vehicles over the next six months, pointing to the logistical problems it has absorbed during the past three months due to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. The new production target involves Toyota operations outside Japan, and mainly involves gas-powered vehicles produced for Middle East and Asian markets. Previously Toyota had planned to cut its production total outside Japan by 38,000 vehicles between May and November this year, and subsequently raised that volume to 83,000 vehicles.
At the same time as these reductions are impacting the automaker’s program in Asia, Toyota announced the start of assembly operations for the new RAV4 Hybrid crossover vehicle in Georgetown, Ken. That plant is the object of $2 billion worth of capital investments announced since 2024, to assemble new electric and hybrid vehicle products. It will launch production of a new Highlander battery electric vehicle in September. Toyota also has started construction for a new painting operations at Georgetown, which it claims will cut its carbon emissions by 30% and reduce water consumption by approximately 1.5 million gallons/year.
Read more at American Machinist
A “Perfect Storm” Of Low Supply And High Demand Keep Beef Prices Climbing
The price of a pound of ground beef is up almost 13% compared to May of last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The cost has more than doubled over the past 15 years. The USDA predicts beef prices will go up another 10% in 2026 — much faster than the rate of inflation. High demand and low supply makes for a perfect storm, said Jamie Luke, a professor of agriculture, food and resource economics at Michigan State University. “Right now we have a historically low number of beef cows in the country,” she said.
On the supply side - war in the Middle East has made fertilizer and fuel more expensive, which makes cattle feed more expensive. On top of that, weather forecasters are predicting an especially hot and dry year in parts of the U.S. with lots of cattle. “Producers have had to make that difficult call to reduce the number of animals they have in their herd to be able to have enough forage to feed,” Luke said.
“Personally, I think the bigger story in beef prices is the consumer demand side,” said Brian Coffey, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University. “Protein is kind of all the rage now, and specifically consumers have kind of gone back to red meat as a source of protein,” he said. Normally, cattle farmers might increase their herd size to meet that consumer demand, but even in areas where there’s likely to be plenty of rain, they aren’t.
Read more at Marketplace
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