Italian authorities warned on the 10th that rivers, lakes and reservoirs in the north are rapidly depleting due to persistent drought, with main waterways nearly dry and agricultural irrigation facing supply cutoffs. Authorities called the situation "extremely severe" and said that if rainfall does not replenish supplies and current irrigation withdrawal levels continue, storage in the Po River basin could be exhausted within 10 days. Flows in the Po delta have fallen sharply and Adriatic seawat

Storage-chip names have tumbled more than 20% in recent weeks after peaking in late June, industry participants said. Meta’s sale of compute capacity stoked fears of excess compute and triggered a sectorwide pullback; SanDisk, Micron, Seagate and Western Digital are among leaders down over 20%. Traders note the industry’s long-standing cycle—capacity broadside expansion in booms, price collapses and industrywide losses, then capex retrenchment and eventual recovery—remains intact. Analysts say the key variable now is whether technical gaps between AI large models continue to narrow, which would materially affect incremental storage demand. Separately, commercial dynamics are shifting: cloud providers and AI data centers are increasingly signing three- to five-year supply agreements with price bands, minimum purchase commitments and customer deposits to secure critical supply, replacing shorter-term, spot or quarterly contracting.

SK Hynix's CEO warned current memory-chip shortages affecting PCs, autos and other devices may persist beyond 2030, saying customers are signing long-term contracts because they expect extended tightness. SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology have been primary beneficiaries of AI-driven data-centre spending, which is boosting demand for traditional DRAM and new high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and making it harder to satisfy broad storage-chip demand. SK Hynix analysis indicates shortages could last into the next decade, and customer signals point to an expected prolonged supply shortfall.