China's rare earth export control "pause" expires November 2026 — Beijing has already shifted to discretionary licensing, meaning the controls never truly lifted; every month until November is borrowed time for Western defense and semiconductor supply chains, and almost no one is pricing the Nov cliff as an imminent event.
The Hormuz disruption simultaneously spikes LNG prices (hurting Asian AI data center energy costs), gold (benefiting crypto's commodity-adjacency narrative), and accelerates the case for onchain commodity tokenization as a hedge instrument — while the copper deficit makes every AI infrastructure buildout timeline and cost model structurally optimistic.