TSMC's revenue over time

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Welcome back to The Pulse, where we dive into interesting AI stories and trends backed by data, all presented through simple visuals.

> revenue hit $88.7B (9M ’25) - already matching full-year 2024 pace

> +36% YoY growth driven by surging AI-chip and HPC demand; Q3 net profit +39% YoY, beating estimates

> on track for ~$130B annualized revenue, new all-time high

> advanced nodes (≤7nm) = 74% of wafer sales: 3nm (23%), 5nm (37%), 7nm (14%)

> ~70% of 2025 CapEx ($40–42B) aimed at these nodes

> HPC (AI compute) = 57% of Q3 revenue, smartphones ~30%

> North America ~76% of total revenue

> Haiku 4.5 shows frontier-level coding at 1/3 cost of $1 input / $5 output per M tokens

> >2× faster than Sonnet 4 while matching coding accuracy

> 96% AIME (Python) - GPT-5 tier math reasoning despite smaller size

> strong agent and tool use - passes SWE-Bench, Terminal-Bench, >50 % OSWorld

> Anthropic’s safest model yet under Constitutional AI

> GPT-5 (medium) leads frontier: top intelligence at ~10× lower cost than 2024 premiums

> new efficiency frontier comprising GPT-5 mini, Grok 4 Fast Reasoning, Gemini 2.5 Flash cluster on Pareto edge of cost vs performance

> cost-IQ curve flattening: 90 % of peak capability now at <1 % cost

> OpenAI builds full-spectrum moat with tiers spanning all efficiency bands

> shift from max-IQ to max-ROI; inference optimization now drives the frontier