TSMC has become the de facto leader when it comes to manufacturing technology. The company is on the forefront of new process technologies, and provides solutions for some of the biggest players in the industry, like Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and AMD, just to name a few. This process leadership means that TSMC is being courted by numerous fabless silicon designers so as to produce their silicon chips with the latest process technologies - part of the reason why TSMC has seen increasing revenues and profits forecasts.

By the end of 2018, TSMC will have taped out 50 7 nm designs, and plans to double that number in 2019. And these design wins don't stand solely on the shoulders of TSMC's first 7 nm technology (which should account for 20% of the company's revenue by 2019); the company will also tape-out chips built upon their 7 nm + EUV process, which will begin production in 2019.

TSMC has quickly (over a span of years, but still) become the de-facto silicon manufacturing giant in the industry. They produce silicon-based solutions for almost all the significant tech companies (NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, including the silicon manufacturing leader of yonder, Intel), and are on the forefront of new fabrication technologies. Just today we've covered how they are already well on their way to their second-gen 7 nm (N7+) fabrication technology with usage of EUV, and carving their path forward for 5 nm (N5).

A report from analyst firm Superdata has put in perspective the craze regarding Battle Royale-type games. Fortnite, developed by EPIC, is now estimated to have earned more than $1 billion in revenue since its launch last year. And it all seems to be going uphill - the game earned some $304 million in May alone solely on its in-game microtransactions, a 4% increase over the still impressive $296 million figure in April. Consider that EPIC only added the Battle Royale game mode last September, and the voracious pace of revenue increase becomes obvious - just the months of May and April account for more than half of the $1 billion being reported here.

Make no mistake: like in all things, there will be an inevitable tumble in popularity and revenue as the game ages, even if it has just now entered its fifth season. However, the rhythm at which funds are flowing into EPIC's coffers will surely enable an even bigger, more impressive experience come Fortnite's successor, which you can bet will be ready to pick up the slack once revenue slows down. It becomes hard not to justify developers' options towards developing these kinds of games over others - it really does seem to be this is where most money's at.

NVIDIA today reported record revenue for the first quarter ended April 29, 2018, of $3.21 billion, up 66 percent from $1.94 billion a year earlier, and up 10 percent from $2.91 billion in the previous quarter.

GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were a record $1.98, up 151 percent from $0.79 a year ago and up 11 percent from $1.78 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $2.05, also a record, up 141 percent from $0.85 a year earlier and up 19 percent from $1.72 in the previous quarter.

"We had a strong quarter with growth across every platform," said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "Our datacenter business achieved another record and gaming remained strong.

"Treat equally that which is equal, treat differently that which is different" seems to be the motto of the new EU proposal for increased taxation on tech giants. The proposal, which will be presented just this Wednesday (March 21st), could lead to increased taxation to tech giants that do business with EU customers by as much (or as little, depending on your point of view) as 3% of their gross revenue (the value still isn't final, but should stay within 1% and 5%). It isn't clear how the customer location business will be defined, but it seems that the EU believes its citizens provide increased revenues for companies than other citizens in other parts of the less developed world do.

This move specifically aims to capture real growth and value of digital-first companies, such as Facebook and Amazon. These are types of companies that the EU feels aren't being taxed proportionally (meaning, they currently provide less than they should to public coffers) to the true value they derive from the region. As most EU matters, any tax proposal will need the unanimous approval of all 28 current members before turning into law, so one country alone could block it.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) today reported record revenue for the fourth quarter ended January 28, 2018, of $2.91 billion, up 34 percent from $2.17 billion a year earlier, and up 10 percent from $2.64 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were a record $1.78, up 80 percent from $0.99 a year ago and up 34 percent from $1.33 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.72, also a record, up 52 percent from $1.13 a year earlier and up 29 percent from $1.33 in the previous quarter.

For fiscal 2018, revenue was a record $9.71 billion, up 41 percent from $6.91 billion a year earlier. GAAP earnings per diluted share were a record $4.82, up 88 percent from $2.57 a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $4.92, also a record, up 61 percent from $3.06 a year earlier. "We achieved another record quarter, capping an excellent year," said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "In a powerful sign of our progress, attendees at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conferences reached 22,000, up tenfold in five years, as software developers working in AI, self-driving cars, and a broad range of other fields continued to discover the acceleration and money-saving benefits of our GPU computing platform.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended December 31, 2017:

• Revenue was $28.9 billion and increased 12%
• Operating income was $8.7 billion and increased 10%
• GAAP net loss was $(6.3) billion and non-GAAP net income was $7.5 billion
• GAAP diluted loss per share was $(0.82) and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.96
• GAAP results include a $13.8 billion net charge related to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)

"This quarter's results speak to the differentiated value we are delivering to customers across our productivity solutions and as the hybrid cloud provider of choice," said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. "Our investments in IoT, data, and AI services across cloud and the edge position us to further accelerate growth."

An artificial intelligence (AI) will deliberately tamper with your online gameplay as you scramble for more in-game items to win. The same AI will manipulate your state of mind at every step of your game to guide you towards more micro-transactions. Nothing in-game is truly fixed-rate. The game maps out your home, and cross-references it with your online footprint, to have a socio-economic picture of you, so the best possible revenue model, and anti buyer's remorse strategy can be implemented on you. These, and more, are part of the dystopian nightmare that takes flight if a new AI-powered online game revenue model is implemented in MMO games of the near future.

The paper's slide-deck and signed papers (with corrections) were leaked to the web by an unknown source, with bits of information (names, brands) redacted. It has too much information to be dismissed off hand for being a prank. It proposes leveraging AI to gather and build a socio-economic profile of a player to implement the best revenue-generation strategy. It also proposes using an AI to consistently "alter" the player's gameplay, such that the player's actions don't have the desired result leading toward beating the game, but towards an "unfair" consequence that motivates more in-game spending. The presentation spans a little over 50 slides, and is rich in text that requires little further explanation.The rest of the presentation follows.

NVIDIA today reported record revenue for the third quarter ended October 29, 2017, of $2.64 billion, up 32 percent from $2.00 billion a year earlier, and up 18 percent from $2.23 billion in the previous quarter, with growth across all its platforms.

GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were a record $1.33, up 60 percent from $0.83 a year ago and up 45 percent from $0.92 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.33, also a record, up 41 percent from $0.94 a year earlier and up 32 percent from $1.01 in the previous quarter.

"We had a great quarter across all of our growth drivers," said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "Industries across the world are accelerating their adoption of AI.

NVIDIA today reported record revenue for the second quarter ended July 30, 2017, of $2.23 billion, up 56 percent from $1.43 billion a year earlier, and up 15 percent from $1.94 billion in the previous quarter.

• Record revenue of $2.23 billion, up 56 percent from a year ago
• GAAP EPS of $0.92, up 124 percent from a year ago
• Non-GAAP EPS of $1.01, up 91 percent from a year ago
• Broad growth across all platforms
• GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.92, up 124 percent from $0.41 a year ago and up 16 percent from $0.79 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.01, up 91 percent from $0.53 a year earlier and up 19 percent from $0.85 in the previous quarter.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2017 of $984 million, operating loss of $29 million, and net loss of $73 million, or $0.08 per share. On a non-GAAP basis, operating loss was $6 million, net loss was $38 million, and loss per share was $0.04. "We achieved 18 percent year-over-year revenue growth driven by strong demand for our high performance Ryzen CPUs as well as graphics processors," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "We are positioned for solid revenue growth and margin expansion opportunities across the business in the year ahead as we bring innovation, performance, and choice to an expanding set of markets."

Microsoft just reported earnings for the last quarter, with the company reporting non-GAAP revenue of $23.6 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.73. YoY, Microsoft reported increased earnings per share of $0.11, from $0.62 in last year's quarter. Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud" business hit $6.8 billion this quarter, up 11 percent from last year's $6.1 billion, and on its way to Microsoft's estimated $20 billion run rate by 2018. Azure revenue was up a staggering 93 percent, driven both by increased demand for the core Azure compute services as well as Azure's premium services. Azure's annual run rate is now $15.2 billion, which puts it on track to hit the $20 billion run rate Microsoft expects to achieve by 2020.

Intel Corporation today reported first-quarter revenue of $14.8 billion, up 8 percent year-over-year on a GAAP basis and 7 percent on a non-GAAP basis. Operating income was $3.6 billion, up 40 percent year-over-year, and non-GAAP operating income was $3.9 billion, up 20 percent. EPS was 61 cents, up 45 percent year-over-year, and non-GAAP EPS was 66 cents, up 22 percent.

The company also generated approximately $3.9 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.2 billion, and used $1.2 billion to repurchase 35 million shares of stock. Intel's board of directors has approved a $10 billion increase to Intel's share buyback program, which brings the amount currently available for future buybacks to approximately $15 billion.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2017 first quarter ended December 31, 2016. The Company posted all-time record quarterly revenue of $78.4 billion and all-time record quarterly earnings per diluted share of $3.36. These results compare to revenue of $75.9 billion and earnings per diluted share of $3.28 in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 64 percent of the quarter's revenue.

"We're thrilled to report that our holiday quarter results generated Apple's highest quarterly revenue ever, and broke multiple records along the way. We sold more iPhones than ever before and set all-time revenue records for iPhone, Services, Mac and Apple Watch," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "Revenue from Services grew strongly over last year, led by record customer activity on the App Store, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline."

Intel today announced their quarterly earnings for Q4 of the 2016 fiscal year. The company set a new record for revenue for this quarter, coming in at $16.4 billion (up 10% from a year ago, which stood at $14.9B). For the year, Intel brought in $59.4 billion, up 7% from their 2015 results. Intel's gross margin fell, though, by 1.7 points down to a still hugely respectable 60.9%, with operating income of $12.9 billion, down 8% from a year ago. Net income was down 10% to $10.3 billion, and earnings per share fell 9% to $2.12. Intel announced a record annual cash flow from operations of $21.8 billion, with solid earnings with GAAP net income of $10.3 billion, and non-GAAP net income of $13.2 billion.

Leaving the corporate numbers talk behind us for a moment, this means that Intel managed to have another astounding year, with solid execution and even more solid margins and revenues. However, take a peek under the hood, and Intel's wins are based on consumer losses: lower volumes in almost all channels were offset by higher average selling prices (ASP), meaning that Intel is (like any company on the top would) keeping its revenue streams up by charging more for its products.

AMD today released their earnings call for 3Q 2016, giving us some interesting tidbits in regards to their financial robustness. The balance of AMD's economics seems to be pending towards better execution, and, coeteris paribus, a much better outlook for the coming quarters, after the monumental missteps in the past that almost threw AMD under the proverbial bus. Reception for the results seems to be a tangled mess, however, with some sides claiming that AMD beat expectations, while others prefer to draw attention to AMD's 2% stock decline since the report was outed.

AMD posted revenue of $1,307 million, up 27% sequentially and 23% year-over-year. This revenue was distributed unevenly through AMD's divisions, though. "Computing and Graphics" segment revenue was $472 million, up 9% from Q2 2016, primarily due to increased GPU sales (where Polaris picked up the grunt of the work, being responsible for 50% of AMD's GPU revenue), offset by lower sales of client desktop processors and chipsets; whereas "Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom" segment revenue was $835 million, up 41% sequentially, primarily due to record semi-custom SoC sales (such as those found in Microsoft's XBOX One and Sony's PS4 and upcoming PS4 Pro).

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter GAAP revenue of $15.8 billion, operating income of $4.5 billion, net income of $3.4 billion and EPS of 69 cents. Intel reported non-GAAP operating income of $5.1 billion, net income of $3.9 billion and EPS of 80 cents. The company generated approximately $5.8 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.2 billion, and used $457 million to repurchase 13 million shares of stock.

"It was an outstanding quarter, and we set a number of new records across the business," said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. "In addition to strong financials, we delivered exciting new technologies while continuing to align our people and products to our strategy. We're executing well, and these results show Intel's continuing transformation to a company that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected devices."

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the second quarter ended July 31, 2016, of $1.43 billion, up 24 percent from $1.15 billion a year earlier, and up 9 percent from $1.30 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.40, compared with $0.05 a year ago and up 21 percent from $0.33 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $0.53, up 56 percent from $0.34 a year earlier and up 15 percent from $0.46 in the previous quarter.

"Strong demand for our new Pascal-generation GPUs and surging interest in deep learning drove record results," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer, NVIDIA. "Our strategy to focus on creating the future where graphics, computer vision and artificial intelligence converge is fueling growth across our specialized platforms -- Gaming, Pro Visualization, Datacenter and Automotive."

Western Digital Corp. today reported revenue of $2.8 billion and net income of $74 million, or $0.32 per share, for its third fiscal quarter ended Apr. 1, 2016. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $283 million, or $1.21 per share. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $3.5 billion and net income of $384 million, or $1.63 per share. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $441 million, or $1.87 per share.

The company generated $485 million in cash from operations during the third fiscal quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $5.9 billion. On Feb. 10, 2016, the company declared a cash dividend of $0.50 per share of its common stock, which was paid on Apr. 15, 2016.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2016 second quarter ended March 26, 2016. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $50.6 billion and quarterly net income of $10.5 billion, or $1.90 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $58 billion and net income of $13.6 billion, or $2.33 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 39.4 percent compared to 40.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 67 percent of the quarter's revenue.

"Our team executed extremely well in the face of strong macroeconomic headwinds," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "We are very happy with the continued strong growth in revenue from Services, thanks to the incredible strength of the Apple ecosystem and our growing base of over one billion active devices."

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended March 31, 2016:

• Revenue was $20.5 billion GAAP, and $22.1 billion non-GAAP
• Operating income was $5.3 billion GAAP, and $6.8 billion non-GAAP
• Net income was $3.8 billion GAAP, and $5.0 billion non-GAAP
• Earnings per share was $0.47 GAAP, and $0.62 non-GAAP

"Organizations using digital technology to transform and drive new growth increasingly choose Microsoft as a partner," said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft. "As these organizations turn to us, we're seeing momentum across Microsoft's cloud services and with Windows 10."

AMD today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2016 of $832 million, operating loss of $68 million, and net loss of $109 million, or $0.14 per share. Non-GAAP operating loss was $55 million and non-GAAP net loss was $96 million, or $0.12 per share.

"Our strategy to build a strong business foundation and improve financial performance through delivering great products is beginning to show benefits," said Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "We continued to strengthen the performance of our Computing and Graphics business as our customers and partners show a growing preference for AMD. We are optimistic about our growth prospects in the second half of the year across our businesses based on new product introductions and design wins."

Intel Corporation today reported first-quarter GAAP revenue of $13.7 billion, operating income of $2.6 billion, net income of $2.0 billion and EPS of 42 cents. Intel reported non-GAAP revenue of $13.8 billion, operating income of $3.3 billion, net income of $2.6 billion and EPS of 54 cents. The company generated approximately $4.0 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.2 billion, and used $793 million to repurchase 27 million shares of stock.

"Our first-quarter results tell the story of Intel's ongoing strategic transformation, which is progressing well and will accelerate in 2016," said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. "We are evolving from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices."

Intel Corporation today reported full-year revenue of $55.4 billion, operating income of $14.0 billion, net income of $11.4 billion and EPS of $2.33. The company generated approximately $19.0 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $4.6 billion and used $3.0 billion to repurchase 96 million shares of stock.

For the fourth quarter, Intel posted revenue of $14.9 billion, operating income of $4.3 billion, net income of $3.6 billion and EPS of 74 cents. The company generated approximately $5.4 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.1 billion, and used $525 million to repurchase 17 million shares of stock.

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the second quarter ended July 26, 2015, of $1.153 billion, up 5 percent from $1.103 billion a year earlier, and up marginally from $1.151 billion the previous quarter.

GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.05. This includes a charge of $0.19 per diluted share in connection with the company's decision to wind down its Icera modem operations, after a viable buyer failed to emerge. It also includes a charge of $0.02 per diluted share related to the NVIDIA SHIELD tablet recall. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $0.34, up 13 percent from $0.30 a year earlier, and up 3 percent from $0.33 in the previous quarter.