US retail sales MoM +0.2% in June, matching +0.2% consensus; May revised up to +1.0% from +0.9%.

PetroChina's Dushanzi Petrochemical Tarim unit completed initial feed and start-up of its phase‑II 1.2 mln t/yr ethylene plant and accompanying green low‑carbon demonstration facilities and has begun commercial operations. The project—China's refining-and-chemicals industry's first full‑chain green low‑carbon ethylene scheme and the world's first ethylene‑cracking carbon‑emissions recycling demonstration base—establishes central/west China's first ~3 mln t ethylene industrial hub, shifting some domestic ethylene capacity away from the eastern concentration and enhancing national energy‑chemical supply‑chain resilience.

FuriosaAI CEO June Paik said at the FKI CEO Jeju forum that global new AI data center builds could total about 100 GW by 2030, which implies semiconductor procurement equivalent to a market worth several quadrillion won. He said generative AI is shifting from model training to application-facing inference, so future demand will concentrate on high energy-efficiency, low-power inference chips. Paik expects most newly built AI data centers will deploy inference rather than training compute and warned that energy efficiency, not raw compute, will determine competitiveness because power supply is the primary bottleneck for data center construction. He added GPUs still dominate today but achieving further efficiency gains will require task-optimized dedicated inference accelerators.