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...
Every Alphabet earnings report now feels like two companies walking onto the same stage. The first is the Google most of us already understand. It owns the world’s most important search engine, operates YouTube, sells an ocean of digital advertising, and generates more cash than many countries could locate with both hands and a flashlight. The second is a vastly more expensive creature being assembled behind the curtain. It consumes data centers, chips, electricity, engineers, fiber, cooling systems, and capital at a rate that would make an industrial empire feel financially self-conscious. This is Alphabet’s AI future, and management is spending as though arriving second would be a form of corporate extinction. As I look ahead to Alphabet’s next earnings report, expected to cover the third quarter of 2026, I am not primarily asking whether the company can beat Wall Street’s revenue estimate by half a billion dollars. Alphabet generated nearly $120 billion in revenue last quarter. At t...