25.05.202610:29 Forex Analysis & Reviews: New "oil," global silicon trap, and price tsunami. Trader's calendar on May 25–27

"Both sides should not rush"

Diplomatic machinery in the Middle East has spun into action with renewed vigor after Qatar, with US mediation, sent its negotiating team to Tehran to put the finishing touches on a peace agreement. The UAE and Saudi Arabia urgently joined the peace coalition, jointly urging Donald Trump to finally turn the page on military action. The need for a de-escalation has become critical: because of a tight blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, India has already been forced for the third time in the past seven days to raise domestic gasoline and diesel prices, knowingly risking a severe inflationary shock to preserve what remains of its sovereign energy supplies.

Against this dramatic background, the White House hurried to declare that a principal consensus had been reached, saying that a comprehensive agreement is practically ready and only awaits the final flourish of a pen. Trump's main triumph would be the immediate unblocking of the Strait of Hormuz, which would return millions of trapped barrels to the market. Analysts at The Wall Street Journal emphasize that, although the US campaign did not immediately bring Tehran to its knees, it inflicted colossal damage on the Iranian regime. Iran's command is decentralized, missile arsenals are depleted, and nuclear ambitions have been set back by years, leaving the once-aggressive Islamic Republic deeply internationally isolated.

However, inside Iran, Trump's victory rhetoric is received with Eastern restraint, and the final green light for the agreement has not yet been given. According to European diplomatic sources, Tehran is still working through several contentious points of the memorandum, maneuvering via Pakistani intermediaries. At the same time, it is preparing a large-scale celebration of a historic victory over the US and Israel for domestic audiences. In substance, the deal being discussed would be a temporary 60-day extension of the ceasefire. The sides would use this period to gradually restore commercial navigation through the strait in exchange for lifting the US naval blockade, while diplomats try to tackle the core nuclear issue.

"The blockade will remain in full force until an agreement is reached, confirmed and signed," the US president added as a caveat. Meanwhile, the largest US retailers, including systemically important giants such as Walmart, Lowe's and Home Depot, are sounding the alarm over rising inflationary pressure. The sharp increase in commercial logistics costs caused by the prolonged geopolitical crisis around the Strait of Hormuz has begun to feed directly into retail prices. Corporations admit they have long tried to artificially freeze prices by cutting their own margins to preserve market share.

But American retail can no longer absorb these massive costs indefinitely. In the near term, the transportation burden will be fully passed on to the end consumer. US consumers have already reacted to the worsening situation by sharply cutting everyday spending and abandoning major purchases. Against this backdrop, the national consumer confidence index recorded a deep fall, reflecting extreme public anxiety over shrinking household budgets. On the financial markets, meanwhile, a tectonic repositioning of market bets has been completed. While the Trump administration lobbied for the appointment of Kevin Warsh in hopes of rate cuts, reality has forced investors to prepare for the opposite scenario.

Fresh, strong CPI and PPI prints that markets have been digesting over the last 14 days have led to a total collapse of previous expectations. Wall Street has fully reoriented to a scenario of an extremely strong dollar and inevitable interest-rate hikes. Current sentiment shows a 180° reversal compared with the pre-crisis configuration at the start of the year, forcing the leadership of major central banks to urgently recalibrate their rhetoric in response to the stark macro data.

Cyberweapons from Anthropic and Musk's trillion-dollar loop

Anthropic's lab has developed a secret AI model called Mythos, which is extraordinarily effective at finding software vulnerabilities, and the company has therefore refused to release it publicly. In closed tests, the algorithm uncovered thousands of critical zero-day flaws across all popular operating systems and browsers, including a legendary 27-year-old hole in one of the world's most secure IT systems. Access to this digital cyberweapon for strictly defensive purposes was granted to a narrow group of roughly 40 selected entities, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and JPMorgan, while the White House blocked expanding the list to another 70 commercial organizations. At the same time, Anthropic launched large-scale legal preparations for its own IPO.

Even more staggering revelations came from the S-1 prospectus of Elon Musk's space empire, which exposed the true financial position of the conglomerate now packaged into SpaceX, including:

• Starlink
• the social network X
• the Grok neural network
• the Colossus supercomputer
• the xAI lab

Although the holding's revenue grew 34% from 2023 to 2025, the only GAAP-profitable year was 2024. In Q1 2026, SpaceX recorded a catastrophic net loss of $4.3 billion on total revenue of $4.7 billion. AI became the main capital sink: in 2025, Musk invested $12.7 billion in AI infrastructure capex, with the technology segment posting an operating loss of $6.4 billion. This black hole is currently heroically subsidized by Starlink, which generated $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025 (a 50% year?on?year increase) and $4.4 billion of operating profit. The satellite provider is now valued at roughly $180 billion and is the group's main cash machine.

The space division looks considerably more modest. Its revenue for 2025 was $4.1 billion (up 8% year?on?year) with an operating loss of $700 million. The older Falcon rockets are profitable, but the Starship project remains deeply loss-making, although a recent successful test flight of the upgraded Starship and Super Heavy V-3 gives Musk reason for optimism. In short, as of 2026, SpaceX is a deeply unprofitable rocket manufacturer hidden inside a highly profitable satellite provider, which in turn is financing a voracious AI lab with $13 billion in annual spending and a social network undergoing restructuring.

Nvidia believes in Vera

However, far more important for the AI industry is the fundamental change in Nvidia's long?term strategy. Company leadership is deliberately moving away from positioning itself as a mere maker of graphics chips, transforming the business into a supplier of comprehensive, vertically integrated compute platforms. The company's modern stack now brings together:

• central processors (CPUs)
• graphics accelerators (GPUs)
• high?speed NVLink interfaces
• networking architecture
• custom software

This approach is driven by a qualitative evolution of the AI industry, which is rapidly shifting from simple one?step computations to complex reasoning and fully autonomous digital agents.

Deploying such systems requires a continuous investment cycle and parabolic scaling of capacity, which in practice creates a permanent demand for solutions from the California giant. Agent?based AI is today the key driver of the structural shortage of compute resources. What were once useful but optional AI technologies have become an absolute necessity for maintaining competitiveness across every sector of the global economy. Against this paradigm and the forecasted surge in capital expenditures by the largest cloud providers above $1 trillion by 2027, Nvidia expects annual global investments in specialized infrastructure to rise.

To expand into adjacent high?margin markets, Nvidia has introduced a specialized central processor called Vera. This is the world's first architecture designed exclusively for the needs of agent?based AI, with a target revenue plan of $20 billion. The chip is optimized for lightning?fast orchestration of agent computations and seamless integration with developer frameworks, opening up an entirely new $200 billion target segment for the company—one previously dominated by traditional CPU makers. Management's strategic priority also includes integrating AI into the physical world through billions of independent robotics and unmanned systems.

To reduce dependence on capital concentration in the hands of a small number of U.S. big tech firms, Nvidia has radically restructured its corporate reporting, implementing a strict split of cash flows into the Hyperscale and ACIE segments, the latter covering all sovereign, industrial and enterprise demand outside the perimeter of the major cloud platforms. Revenues between these directions are now roughly evenly split, but the diversified ACIE sector has been declared the top priority. The technological core of this ecosystem scales beyond data centers to edge devices directly through the expansion of the CUDA software environment. The rollout of physical infrastructure solutions, simulation platforms and robotics frameworks lays the foundation for Nvidia's total dominance in the new era of the autonomous industry.

The main strategic barrier to large?scale technological expansion is not primarily a lack of financial resources or purely engineering limits.

• The chief challenge for the industry is an all?out hunger for power generation capacity, which will inevitably slow the deployment of new AI compute factories. Nvidia's current production capabilities for high?performance chips far outpace the real economy's ability to supply data centers with the necessary power infrastructure.
• Next in the hierarchy of threats is the severe desynchronization of logistics chains, where different upgrade speeds and operational bottlenecks at even a single key supplier can completely block the entire production cycle.
• The situation is further aggravated by geopolitical factors: export controls against China, strict government regulation of innovation, the expansion of open systems, and intensifying competition among builders of turnkey compute clusters.

In today's macroeconomic reality, raw compute power has finally taken on the role of the new oil. World governments are beginning to regard data centers, microchips and related AI infrastructure with the same level of strategic concern that previous generations reserved for national power grids and nuclear technologies. About 90% of all global AI compute today is tightly controlled by entities from the US and China, forcing other countries to frantically seek ways to carve out at least some niche in this value chain. The experience of middle powers shows that to gain enormous geopolitical weight, it is not necessary to build a sovereign cycle from scratch.

57 countries and 70 crossings

It is enough to monopolize a single indispensable node.

• South Korea firmly holds the global memory market.
• The Netherlands completely controls lithography thanks to ASML.
• Taiwan has centralized physical chip fabrication, giving these players enormous leverage over all counterparties, including Washington.

The global architecture for making modern microchips is an extremely complex transnational mechanism, where the basic stage starts with growing ultra?pure silicon ingots in quartz crucibles in North Carolina, US. The processing of raw material into finished wafers is almost entirely controlled by just five corporations from Japan, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan, which together hold about 95% of the global market, while the supply of photoresists and masks remains strictly in the hands of Asian manufacturers. In the precision equipment segment, more than 40% of the market is held by US firms such as Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA. Another 29% is controlled by Japan via Tokyo Electron and Nikon. Dutch ASML has an absolute monopoly on EUV lithography machines, although those extremely complex systems cannot be assembled without unique German optics from ZEISS.

Final fabrication of advanced chips is over 90% localized in Taiwan by TSMC. The last and most labor?intensive stages of packaging and testing are about 95% tied to factories in Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines, where mainland China's share reaches 28%. In total, 57 countries are involved in making a single chip, and a semiconductor crosses international borders more than 70 times, so a local failure at any geographic point can instantly paralyze the industry worldwide.

May 25

25 May, 15:30 / Canada / Wholesale trade volumes in April / prev.: 2.0% / actual: 1.9% / forecast: 0.8% / USD/CAD – up

In March, wholesale trade volumes in Canada rose 1.9% month?on?month, beating initial market expectations. The main gains were recorded in:

• the machinery and computer equipment segment
• the personal goods and pharmaceuticals sector, while the agricultural direction showed a decline.

Regionally, Ontario and Alberta showed the strongest dynamics. The April report is expected to show a slowdown in wholesale sales growth. If final data confirm the forecast, it will indicate a cooling of trade activity and weaken the Canadian dollar.

May 26

26 May, 02:01 / United Kingdom / Retail prices inflation in May / prev.: 1.2% / actual: 1.0% / forecast: 1.1% / GBP/USD – up

Annual retail price inflation in the UK slowed to 1.0% in April, marking the weakest pace since the end of last year. Against the backdrop of increased price competition among retailers to stimulate spring spending, the easing of inflationary pressure in retail was driven by Easter discounts on:

• food
• clothing
• furniture

Analysts expect a slight pickup in May's report. Confirmation of the forecast would signal renewed price growth and strengthen the pound.

26 May, 13:00 / United Kingdom / CBI retail sales volume indicator for May / prev.: -52 pts / actual: -68 pts / forecast: -60 pts / GBP/USD – up

The CBI retail sales volumes index in the UK plunged to a historic low in April, the lowest since data collection began in the early 1980s. The deep slump in retail and wholesale activity hit both physical stores and the online sector as households' concerns about inflation intensified. The May report forecasts a weak attempt at recovery, but the index will remain in deep pessimism. If actual data match the forecast, it will signal a fixation of consumer market depression and lead to pound appreciation.

26 May, 15:30 / United States / Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) for April / prev.: 0.03 pts / actual: -0.20 pts / forecast: -0.30 pts / USDX (6?currency USD index) – down

The Chicago Fed economic activity index fell to -0.20 in March, marking a multi?month low. Three of the four main components contributed negatively, including production, retail sales and personal consumption, while employment showed a moderate improvement. The April report is expected to show a further decline. If the statistics confirm the forecast, it will signal a general slowdown in the national economy and weaken the dollar.

26 May, 16:00 / United States / S&P CoreLogic Case?Shiller home price index for March / prev.: 1.2% / actual: 0.9% / forecast: 1.0% / USDX (6?currency USD index) – up

Annual growth of the home price index in major US metros slowed to 0.9% in February, a multi?year low. High mortgage rates continue to restrain housing affordability and transaction volumes, so nominal price growth lags behind inflation. More than half of key cities recorded year?on?year price declines, while some large markets still showed positive dynamics. The March report is forecast to show a moderate acceleration. Confirmation would indicate stabilization in the housing sector and strengthen the dollar.

26 May, 17:00 / United States / Consumer confidence indicator for May / prev.: 92.2 pts / actual: 92.8 pts / forecast: 92.0 pts / USDX (6?currency USD index) – down

In the previous period, the Conference Board consumer confidence index stood at 92.8, near its long?term average. This indicator assesses household sentiment about the labor market and overall business conditions. Analysts expect a slight decline in May. If actual data match market expectations, it will signal sustained moderate consumer pessimism, boosting demand for risk assets and weakening the US dollar.

26 May, 17:30 / United States / Texas Manufacturing Outlook Index for May / prev.: -0.2 pts / actual: -2.3 pts / forecast: -1.0 pts / USDX (6?currency USD index) – up

In April, the Texas manufacturing activity index fell to a negative -2.3, a local low for the year. Despite labor market stabilization and improved long?term company outlooks, cost pressures in the sector intensified sharply and finished goods prices reached multi?year highs. Analysts expect a partial rebound in May. Confirmation of these expectations would indicate persistent high input?cost inflation in the region and strengthen the US dollar.

May 27

27 May, 04:30 / Australia / Headline consumer inflation in April / prev.: 3.7% / actual: 4.6% / forecast: 4.4% / AUD/USD – down

Annual inflation in Australia accelerated sharply to 4.6% in March, a multi?month high driven by:

• a surge in fuel prices
• higher transport costs

Elevated price pressure also persisted in food, clothing and housing, keeping the overall CPI well above the central bank's target range. The April report is expected to show a slight slowdown. If the forecast is confirmed, the temporary easing of the price shock will weaken the Australian dollar.

27 May, 04:30 / Australia / Average consumer price index (Core CPI) in April / prev.: 0.2% / actual: 0.3% / forecast: 0.4% / AUD/USD – up

The RBA?adjusted core CPI rose 0.3% month?on?month in March, showing steady growth under the new monthly inflation?measurement methodology. This measure is a key guide for monetary policy. April is forecast to show further acceleration in core inflation. If final statistics match market expectations, it will confirm the persistence of core price pressure and strengthen the Australian dollar.

27 May, 04:30 / China / Industrial profits in April / prev.: 15.2% / actual: 15.5% / forecast: 12.0% / Brent – down, USD/CNY – up

In Q1, profits of large Chinese industrial firms rose 15.5% year?on?year, accelerating thanks to a confident recovery in the state sector and stability among private firms. Manufacturing showed the strongest dynamics, while utilities saw a decline. In March, profit growth reached a six?month high despite logistical difficulties and geopolitical uncertainty. The April report is expected to show a moderate slowdown. If actual data match the forecast, it will indicate cooling industrial activity, leading to lower Brent prices and a weaker yuan.

27 May, 06:00 / New Zealand / RBNZ interest rate decision, press conference / prev.: 2.25% / actual: 2.25% / forecast: 2.25% / NZD/USD – volatile

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand's policy rate is the key monetary tool determining interbank lending conditions. Changes to the rate or the central bank's rhetoric directly shape investor expectations about borrowing costs and growth. Analysts expect the rate to be kept at 2.25% at the upcoming meeting. If the rate remains unchanged, hawkish comments or hints of imminent tightening would trigger high volatility in the kiwi.

27 May, 07:00 / Eurozone / Passenger car registrations in April / prev.: 1.4% / actual: 12.5% / forecast: 6.6% / EUR/USD – down

Passenger car registrations in the EU surged in March to a multi?year high thanks to:

• new tax incentives
• government stimulus programs in the bloc's largest countries

A particularly strong impulse came from the electric vehicle segment, whose market share grew noticeably amid higher conventional fuel costs. April is forecast to show a slowdown in the expansion of the car market. Confirmation of the forecast would signal a waning effect of fiscal incentives and weaken the euro.

27 May, 15:15 / US / Weekly private sector job growth (ADP) / prev.: 33.0k / actual: 42.25k / forecast: – / USDX (6?currency USD index) – volatile

According to ADP, the average weekly private?sector job gain over a 4?week period accelerated to 42.25k, showing positive employment dynamics for the second consecutive week and indicating labor market resilience. With no forecast provided for the next period, the release of fresh data will produce high volatility in the dollar index.

27 May, 17:00 / US / Richmond Fed manufacturing index for May / prev.: 0 pts / actual: 3 pts / forecast: 4 pts / USDX (6?currency USD index) – up

The Richmond Fed manufacturing index showed a moderate rebound in April, turning positive for the first time in a long period. The sector demonstrated strong resilience to higher energy and logistic costs amid the Middle East conflict, supported by:

• increased inflows of new orders
• stabilization of hiring at local firms
• Analysts expect further strengthening of regional industrial activity in May.

If actual data reach the forecast level, it will confirm an expanding industrial impulse in the national economy and strengthen the US dollar.

27 May, 23:30 / US / API crude oil stocks / prev.: -2.188 mln bbl / actual: -9.1 mln bbl / forecast: – / Brent – volatile

According to the American Petroleum Institute, US commercial crude stocks registered a large weekly draw, far exceeding market expectations. Significant reductions also affected gasoline, distillate inventories and stocks at the Cushing hub, and the country's strategic reserve fell to its lowest since the summer of 2024 due to major releases. With no forecast for the next period, continued rapid depletion of inventories will ensure high volatility in oil prices.

26 May, 15:30 / Canada / Speech by Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada Nicholas Vincent / USD/CAD

27 May, 03:00 / Japan / Speech by Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda / USD/JPY

27 May, 06:00 / New Zealand / Speech by RBNZ Governor Adrian Orr / NZD/USD

27 May, 11:00 / United States / Speech by Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan / USDX

27 May, 11:00 / Australia / Speech by RBA Deputy Governor Andrew Hauser / AUD/USD

27 May, 22:55 / United States / Speech by Fed Governor Lisa Cook / USDX

Also scheduled are speeches by representatives of major central banks. Their comments typically trigger volatility in currency markets as they may signal future policy moves on interest rates.