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The stock market has its own way of announcing a shift in power.
Sometimes it happens quietly — a single earnings report, a number that looks small on paper but echoes across continents. This week, that echo came from Taiwan, and it carried the unmistakable sound of acceleration.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, revealed a 35% jump in quarterly profit, a surge driven almost entirely by the global hunger for artificial intelligence chips. It wasn’t just a strong quarter. It was a declaration — a reminder that the AI economy is no longer a trend but a structural force reshaping global markets.
Investors felt it instantly. U.S.-listed shares of TSMC climbed sharply, pulling the semiconductor sector — and with it, the broader market — back into motion. After days of hesitation, Wall Street found its pulse again.
The numbers themselves tell a story of momentum. TSMC’s revenue in the December quarter rose nearly 39% year-over-year, while net income soared to a record NT$374.68 billion, beating every analyst expectation. Advanced chips — the kind that power AI servers, large language models, and next‑generation data centers — made up the overwhelming majority of the company’s wafer revenue. Demand isn’t slowing. It’s accelerating.
For eight consecutive quarters, TSMC has posted year‑over‑year profit growth, each one higher than the last. This is not normal behavior for a company of its size. This is what happens when a single industry — AI — becomes the gravitational center of global technology.
And the momentum isn’t stopping. TSMC has already forecast up to 40% revenue growth in the coming quarter, fueled by the ramp‑up of 3nm and 5nm technologies and the insatiable demand for AI accelerators. Its fabs are running at near‑full capacity. Its clients — from cloud giants to hardware makers — are ordering faster than the company can produce.
The AI gold rush is real. And TSMC is the foundry at the heart of it.
Behind the numbers lies a deeper truth: the stock market is no longer reacting to AI hype — it is reacting to AI infrastructure. The companies that build the physical backbone of intelligence — chips, servers, data centers — are becoming the new market makers.
TSMC’s record‑breaking quarter, with profits reaching US$16 billion and AI applications accounting for more than half of total revenue, is the clearest signal yet. This is not a cycle. This is a transformation.
And Wall Street knows it.
The rebound in the S&P 500, the renewed strength in the Nasdaq, the sudden return of investor confidence — all of it traces back to a single idea: AI is not slowing down. Not this quarter. Not this year. Not anytime soon.
TSMC didn’t just report earnings. It reminded the world that the future is being built in silence, in clean rooms, in wafers measured in nanometers — and that the companies shaping that future are rewriting the rules of the market.
This is the new center of gravity. And everything else is starting to orbit around it.