There are ordinary earnings reports, and then there are Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company earnings reports—the quarterly moment when much of the technology industry gathers around one company’s numbers and attempts to determine whether the artificial-intelligence boom is still a historic infrastructure cycle or merely the most expensive group project in corporate history. TSMC trades in the United States under the ticker TSM, but I do not think of it as just another semiconductor stock. I see it as the industrial foundation beneath an astonishing amount of modern computing. Other companies design the glamorous chips, announce them beneath theatrical lighting, give them aggressive names, and explain how they will transform civilization. TSMC performs the slightly less cinematic task of actually manufacturing many of them. Without that manufacturing capacity, the grand AI revolution becomes an attractive slide presentation waiting for hardware. That is what makes the next earnin...