TSMC's third-quarter revenue and profit both came in above expectations, and the company gave a bullish outlook for advanced processes and AI demand. Yet Taiwan's stock market still slumped the same day on US inflation data and concerns over AI-related debt — leaving investors with good news colliding with a bad market.

• TSMC's third-quarter revenue surged to US$46.7 billion, above the top end of its earlier guidance, and earnings per share hit a record high.
• The 2-nanometre process is ramping rapidly into volume production and demand for advanced processes is extremely strong; US-dollar revenue is forecast to grow 44% year on year in 2026.
• C.C. Wei noted that AI is shifting from chatbots toward "AI agent assistants," and that together with the spread of open-source models this is driving simultaneous increases in the use of wafers, CPUs and high-speed networking chips: "Every AI company is working with TSMC."
• Weak consumer electronics, rising component prices and an uncertain economic outlook have made TSMC relatively conservative in its planning for 2027.
• Taiwan's stock market plunged more than 3% the same day, the sixth-largest point drop on record. The main triggers were higher-than-expected US inflation for September, along with a spike in the bond yield of AI cloud provider CoreWeave to nearly 15%, which set off market doubts about AI firms borrowing heavily to build data centres and also dragged down tech stocks such as SpaceX and Oracle.

Outlook: AI orders should continue to support TSMC's results in the near term, but until pressure from inflation and AI financing eases, stock market volatility will be hard to avoid.