18/03/2026

BIZ & FINANCE WEDNESDAY | MAR 18, 2026

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Edible oils caught between weak demand and biodiesel bets, says analyst MUMBAI: Global edible oil markets are behaving unpredictably as energy supply disruptions from the Middle East war lift hopes for biodiesel demand, though subdued buying from major importers has clouded the price outlook, industry veteran Dorab Mistry said. “Wartime market behaviour is always very different and many developments come unexpectedly,“ Mistry, the director of Indian consumer goods company Godrej International, told Reuters. Crude oil prices jumped to a near four-year high last week after Iran responded to joint US-Israeli attacks by threatening to fire on vessels moving through the Strait of Hormuz. This rally has made the use of vegetable oils for biofuel production more attractive. “Right now, edible demand is subdued as prices have jumped. Market has high hopes for biodiesel. It remains to be seen which factor will eventually prevail,“ Mistry said. One of the most closely watched analysts of edible oils, Mistry’s forecasts for supply and prices often move markets. Malaysian palm oil prices have jumped 14% so far this month to trade above RM4,600 per ton, making the tropical oil more expensive than rival soyoil, except in Asia, where lower freight costs keep it competitive for buyers. Mistry last month forecast palm oil futures to trade in the RM3,800-RM4,300 range until July 2026, as demand remains weak amid ample supplies. India, the world’s largest vegetable oil buyer, is reluctant to make new purchases at higher price levels, with refiners waiting for prices to correct, dealers said. Indian importers have been hit after cutting inventories and washing out a large volume of previously booked imports, Mistry said. Several soyoil cargoes from South America and the Black Sea, booked for delivery in the coming months, were washed out after global soyoil prices surged, as buyers found it more profitable to return the shipments to suppliers rather than process and sell them in India, dealers said. Limited import arrivals are expected to support Indian edible oil prices, though strong mustard oil supplies are helping temper the increase, Mistry said. Rapeseed and mustard are the main winter-sown oilseeds in India and supplies are expected from the new season crop from the next month. – Reuters

Nvidia expects revenue of US$1 trillion through 2027

o New forecast marks big step-up from US$500 billion seenfor 2026

SAN JOSE: Nvidia said the revenue opportunity for its artificial intelligence chips may reach at least US$1 trillion (RM3.9 trillion) through 2027, as the company outlined a strategy to compete more aggressively in the fast-growing market for running AI systems in real time. CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a new central processor and an AI system built on technology from Groq - a chip startup from which Nvidia licensed technology for US$17 billion in December at its annual GTC developer conference in San Jose, California. The moves are part of Huang’s bid to firm up the company’s position in so-called inference computing, the process of answering queries, where its graphics processors face greater competition from central processing units and custom processors built by the likes of Google. Nvidia chips have dominated the process of AI model training, which has been the focus of recent years. “The inference inflection has

handle a first step called “prefill”, where the user’s request is transformed from human words into the language of “tokens” that AI computers use. Groq’s new chips will handle a second “decode” stage where the AI computer provides the answer the user is looking for. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars in recent years on chips for training their AI models, companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta are shifting toward serving hundreds of millions of users who are tapping those AI systems. That is also driving demand for CPUs – which are dominated by Intel and are increasingly seen as a viable alternative to graphics processors from Nvidia for deploying AI models. “We are selling a lot of CPU standalone,” Huang said as he unveiled the new Vera CPU. “This is already for sure going to be a multi-billion-dollar business for us,” he added. Huang also showed off the company’s Feynman roadmap but offered few details beyond a list of the various chips Nvidia plans to include in the platform, including AI processors and several networking chips. The Feynman architecture is expected in 2028, following the company’s Rubin Ultra chips. The company is also targeting the market for autonomous AI agents with NemoClaw, which integrates with the viral OpenClaw platform to add privacy and safety controls to the tool that can autonomously execute a wide range of tasks with minimal human guidance and has generated global buzz. “It’s kind of uplevelled the entire discussion. It’s up levelled the entire thought of how they do infrastructure,” said Technalysis Research president Bob O’Donnell, referring to the announcements. “He (Huang) used to come out with a new GPU chip and say, look, here’s my new chip. Now he’s got, you know, five racks of equipment that make up these systems.” – Reuters

from the US$500 billion revenue opportunity through 2026 that Nvidia cited for its Blackwell and Rubin AI chips on its last earnings call in February. Shares of Nvidia briefly jumped on the new forecast but pared those gains to close up 1.2%. “Huang mapping out a US$1 trillion opportunity through 2027 underscores the durable demand for Nvidia’s AI infrastructure despite investor concerns,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said. “It signals Nvidia is sustaining its leadership in the AI chip market while the overall AI industry expands beyond early experimentation into large-scale deployment.” Huang said that inference, where AI systems answer questions or carry out tasks, will be split up into two steps. Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips will

arrived,” Huang said. “And demand just keeps on going up.” Dressed in his signature black leather jacket, Huang was speaking at a hockey arena with a capacity of more than 18,000 at the four-day conference that has become one of the biggest showcases of AI technology. “I just want to remind you, this is a tech conference,” he told the audience. But after a dazzling rally that made Nvidia the first company to hit a US$5 trillion valuation last October, doubts have risen about its growth. Investors have also questioned if its plan of plowing back profits into the AI ecosystem will pay off. Huang’s comments allayed some fears. The US$1 trillion forecast is up

Huang speaks at the NVIDIA GTC global AI conference in San Jose. – REUTERSPIC

Meta shares jump after report on plans for layoffs of 20% or more SAN FRANCISCO: Meta Platforms shares rose nearly 3% on Monday after a Reuters report that the social media giant plans to lay off 20% or more of its workforce to offset heavy spending on artificial intelligence and bet on productivity gains from the technology. It expects a capital outlay of up to US$135 billion in 2026, roughly double of last year’s spending. The expenditure is meant to secure the cloud capacity needed to train and run AI models, and Meta will spend up to US$27 billion for such services from Nebius under a deal on Monday. performance of that model has also lagged expectations. A 20% staff cut could amount to about US$6 billion in cost savings, or a 5% boost to adjusted core earnings, Rosenblatt Securities analyst Barton Crockett said. Its stock was trading at US$629. It has declined 7% so far this year, after rising nearly 13% in 2025. AI-linked layoffs have been rising globally. Companies have announced more than 61,000 job cuts tied to AI, including Amazon and Australia’s Wisetech, since November. layoffs over-hiring at companies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that some companies were blaming AI for the job cuts they would have made anyway. also follow a period of

“Is AI a convenient scapegoat for cuts that might have happened anyway? Perhaps. But we believe the market will quickly see through companies using AI as camouflage,“ Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik said. He added that Meta was “probably the best placed incumbent to pivot to an AI-enabled organisation”, pointing to the success of its post-pandemic restructuring. – Reuters

“This doesn’t have to stop at 20%. There could be more down the road if AI is truly this impactful on staff productivity.” Meta, whose workforce totalled 79,000 at the end of December, said on Friday,“this is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches” in response to Reuters’ request for comment.

If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the cuts will be the biggest since a late 2022 and early 2023 restructuring it dubbed the “year of efficiency”, which eliminated around 21,000 jobs. After falling behind in the AI race, Meta has spent heavily in recent years to catch up by building data centers and waging a talent war.

The debate over AI replacing human workers has intensified after Block CEO Jack Dorsey last month unveiled plans to let go nearly half of his company’s staff, saying the technology has changed “what it means to build and run a company.” Some analysts have noted that the

While the spending has powered improvements in Meta’s ad-tools and boosted sales, it has yet to roll out an AI model that can challenge industry leaders OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Meta has been working on a new model called Avocado, but the