The AI news cycle is catching its breath before Friday’s twin headline events, which puts the spotlight squarely on the money underneath: today’s TSMC earnings, a major bet on data-center power, and fresh moves in pricing and funding.
TSMC reports full second-quarter earnings today
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing delivers its complete Q2 results today, having already confirmed record quarterly revenue of NT$1.27 trillion (about $39.6 billion), up 36 percent year over year. Analysts expect a roughly 59 percent surge in net profit to around $19.65 billion, which would mark a fifth consecutive record quarter, and the key question on the 0600 GMT earnings call is whether management raises its full-year growth outlook above 30 percent. As the sole manufacturer of the most advanced AI chips at scale, TSMC’s guidance is the clearest available signal of how durable the AI capital-spending cycle really is.
Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR put $5.34 billion behind data-center power
Pipeline operator Williams secured a $5.34 billion investment from a Blackstone-led group, with Apollo and KKR participating, for a 49 percent stake in five behind-the-meter natural gas power projects totaling more than 2.6 gigawatts. One of the plants will deliver 200 MW directly to a Meta data-center campus in Ohio. With grid connections now taking years, the deal shows private capital treating on-site electricity, rather than chips, as the binding constraint on AI growth.
Anthropic localizes Claude pricing for India
Anthropic has begun localizing Claude subscription pricing for India, now its largest market after the United States. The move lowers the barrier to paid adoption in a price-sensitive market of hundreds of millions of potential users, and signals how seriously frontier labs are competing for international growth beyond their home markets.
Video-generation startup PixVerse raises $439 million
PixVerse closed a $439 million round that pushes its valuation past $2 billion, one of the largest bets yet on AI video generation. The raise underlines that investor appetite for generative video remains strong even as the segment grows crowded with offerings from the major labs.
What to watch: tomorrow is shaping up as the biggest AI day of the year, with Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro expected to launch and Shanghai’s World AI Conference opening with Xi Jinping delivering the keynote in person for the first time.