Vortexa: U.S. Sanctions Push Iran's Crude Oil Exports to Zero, No Recovery Seen in October

According to Bitget market data, South Korea’s semiconductor stock market is rebounding. The KOSPI Composite Index is currently up 1.52%, with SK Hynix rising 3.47% and Samsung Electronics gaining 3.66%. Prior to this, South Korea’s stock market had seen five consecutive trading days of sell-offs, with semiconductor stocks experiencing particularly sharp declines. Market concerns first stem from China’s growing competitiveness. ChangXin Memory Technologies recently disclosed that it has made key progress on a memory chip architecture that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are also developing. While this technological breakthrough is still far from translating into large-scale, commercial competitive production capacity, investors have begun reassessing how the catch-up of Chinese storage manufacturers will impact the future pricing power and valuation premiums of South Korea’s two leading chip firms. Marginal shifts in AI investment logic have also amplified the downturn. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan noted that demand for computing power infrastructure still exceeds the industry’s current supply, and the supply-demand gap may persist until 2029 or even 2030. As hardware bottlenecks such as chips, memory, and power gradually ease, access to capital could become the biggest constraint on AI expansion. Many AI investors do not clearly understand the business models they are betting on, yet set extreme expectations, ultimately making this round of investment "almost like being in a casino".

According to HTX market data, GNS has surged over 118% in the past 24 hours, currently trading at $0.78 with a market cap of $17.33 million. GNS is the native token of decentralized leverage trading platform Gains Network. Earlier on September 4, Binance announced it would add a watchlist tag for Gains Network (GNS).

According to monitoring by EmberCN, a whale or institution trading ETH via Galaxy Digital's OTC desk sold its final 10,000 ETH today, worth roughly $25 million, completing its full liquidation. On-chain data shows the address bought 52,000 ETH at an average price of $2,161 between July and September, and has since late September sold the holdings in tranches at an average price of $2,632, generating a total profit of around $24.49 million over two and a half months.

Insight Beating AI Flash News: Google has officially rolled out Gemini 4 Argon to all global paid users, after the model was previously only available to select cybersecurity partners. The most eye-catching demo features a robot use case: Argon watches a video of a human throwing sandbags at a target, identifies the field location, calculates full-body joint movements, and writes its own physics simulation program. After simulation and real-device migration, Apollo, the humanoid robot from U.S. robotics firm Apptronik, successfully hits the target 7 times in a row on the actual field. Google notes this workflow cuts manual simulation modeling—originally taking weeks—down to just hours. In other demos, Argon built a simulation environment for Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, letting it practice opening trash can lids and tossing in cans. It can also generate a simulation scene from a single photo of a desk, synthesizing over 4,500 training data segments. After fine-tuning the robot action model with this data, the real-device task success rate rose from 56% to 75%, while time per task dropped from 35 seconds to 24 seconds. In the ERQA benchmark, which tests 3D spatial and physical understanding capabilities, Argon scored 87%, outperforming other leading models. Currently, Google AI Pro and Ultra users can access Argon in the Gemini app; access in Antigravity is limited to Ultra users only, and developers can also call it via a paid API. The API launch price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, on par with Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, and just one-fifth the price of Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra. However, this discount is only valid until November 30, after which prices will double, matching Claude Opus 5.5’s rates.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will release September CPI data at 20:30 ET tonight. Analysts expect the headline CPI year-over-year rise to climb from 3.4% in August to 3.6%, with a month-over-month increase of 0.6%—the largest in nearly five months, driven mainly by a rebound in energy prices. Core CPI is projected to rise 2.5% year-over-year and 0.2% month-over-month, down from the prior reading of 0.3%. This CPI print is the final inflation report ahead of the Federal Reserve’s October 27-28 policy meeting. Data from the CME Group shows markets currently pricing in a roughly 17% probability of a Fed rate hike in October. If core CPI posts a 0.3% month-over-month rise, it could rekindle expectations for a rate hike this month; if it meets the 0.2% forecast, the Fed is likely to hold off on action, pushing any rate hike decision to December. Additionally, the U.S. will release PPI data on Thursday, with both CPI and PPI figures influencing market assessments of future inflation trends and the Fed’s policy path.

Applied Materials, the world’s largest semiconductor equipment manufacturer, has officially inaugurated the EPIC Semiconductor R&D Center. Located in Sunnyvale, California, the project is expected to have a total investment of $5 billion, aimed at accelerating innovation in advanced chip technology for the AI era. Spanning approximately 600,000 square feet, the EPIC Center will host research teams from industry giants including Intel, TSMC, Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung, who will collaborate with Applied Materials engineers on R&D and gain early access to the latest semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Applied Materials noted that the center is expected to cut the cycle for next-generation chip architectures from concept development to commercialization, from the usual 10 to 12 years to as little as 6 years. The facility is primarily for R&D rather than mass chip production, so it does not signal a direct near-term resurgence in U.S. chip manufacturing capacity, but is expected to strengthen Silicon Valley’s competitiveness in advanced semiconductors and AI chips. Applied Materials’ U.S. shares closed 2.88% lower on Tuesday, turned positive in after-hours trading, and are now up 0.74%, with its market capitalization rebounding to $8.3 billion.