Financial data and market price are current as of July 23, 2026. Arista Networks is scheduled to report second-quarter results on August 4, so the numbers and outlook discussed here may change after that report. When most investors picture artificial intelligence infrastructure, they tend to imagine enormous rooms filled with GPUs glowing like expensive space heaters. Nvidia receives most of the attention because its accelerators perform the heavy computational work behind large language models, recommendation systems, autonomous technologies, and increasingly ambitious efforts to persuade software that it should do our paperwork for us. I understand the fascination. GPUs are powerful, scarce, expensive, and attached to one of the strongest technology investment stories of this generation. They are also easy to explain. More artificial intelligence requires more computing power, and more computing power requires more chips. But a data center full of accelerators is not automatically an...
Every time Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing reports another remarkable quarter, I ask myself the same question: How can one company be simultaneously one of the strongest businesses in the world and one of the most uncomfortable stocks to own? The answer is simple. TSMC manufactures the most important chips on Earth from an island that sits at the center of one of the most dangerous geopolitical rivalries on Earth. That creates an investment capable of inspiring admiration and indigestion at the same time. TSMC is the manufacturing engine behind much of modern computing. It produces advanced semiconductors for artificial intelligence systems, smartphones, data centers, automobiles, communications equipment, and countless devices most of us use without thinking about the microscopic engineering inside them. When a technology company announces a revolutionary processor, investors usually celebrate the company whose name appears on the presentation. TSMC is often the business actually r...