June 8, 2026 SMM Tin Morning Brief:
Futures: The most-traded SHFE tin contract maintained a downward trend during the night session, with the price center dropping to around 400,000 yuan/mt.
Macro: (1) SK Telecom and NVIDIA announced on June 8 that SK Telecom plans to build a gigawatt-scale AI cloud infrastructure in South Korea based on NVIDIA’s DSX platform. The first AI factory is expected to go into operation in 2027, with an eye on future expansion to broader regions across Asia. This AI cloud will be built on NVIDIA’s DSX full-stack reference architecture, supporting training, inference, and agentic workloads, covering sovereign AI, physical AI, and enterprise AI application scenarios. SK Telecom will also join the NVIDIA Cloud Partner Program. Meanwhile, NVIDIA and SK Group announced plans to conduct joint research, jointly exploring next-generation AI factory architectures, focusing on full-stack innovation from chips to power grids, encompassing accelerated computing, storage technologies, and data center operations. (2) NVIDIA (NVDA.O) CEO Huang Renxun stated that the company’s new Vera central processing unit will adopt SK hynix’s memory chips, and the two companies expect to have more collaboration in the coming year. Speaking to reporters outside a restaurant in Seoul on Sunday, Huang Renxun said that he had dinner that day with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung, and SK Telecom executives. He said, “Our cooperation scale with SK hynix this year is very large, and we are preparing for an even larger scale of cooperation for H2 this year and next year. We introduced the Vera CPU, a revolutionary central processing unit, which will also adopt SK hynix DRAM memory.” Vera is NVIDIA’s first standalone data center microprocessor, and will directly compete with Intel’s Xeon series, AMD’s EPYC chips, and self-developed Graviton chips from large enterprises like Amazon. Huang Renxun arrived in South Korea on Friday to visit partners and suppliers, and plans to meet with Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Jun Young-hyun on Monday, as well as senior executives from Hyundai Motor Group, LG Group, and other enterprises. He also stated that discussions are underway with telecommunications companies, because future telecommunication networks will be used for AI applications.
Fundamentals: (1) Supply side: In June, most smelters focused on stable production. (2) Demand side: Downstream procurement was cautious, with purchases made based on orders.
Spot market: After tin prices surged to a historically extreme high of 440,000-450,000 yuan/mt, small and medium-sized producers generally stopped taking orders. The spot market effectively came to a halt, and after shipments of spot cargoes from smelters were blocked, they chose to register the goods as exchange warrants to lock in futures profits.
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![Tin prices are caught in a tug-of-war between support from overseas demand expectations and weak domestic spot buying [SMM Tin Morning Briefing]](https://imgqn.smm.cn/usercenter/bYFQn20251217171752.jpg)
