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Issue 71: TSMC Posts Record $46.7 Billion Quarter on AI Demand

Permanent copy of issue 71. Today's issue is always the front page.

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TSMC reported record third-quarter revenue of about NT$1.49 trillion, up roughly 50 percent from a year earlier and above its own guidance. Black Hills signed contracts to build 564 megawatts of new gas generation and run a 2.1 gigawatt private microgrid for a planned Google data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Department of Energy told federal regulators that PJM must stop shifting the cost of serving new data centers onto existing ratepayers. Microsoft shrank the coding model behind GitHub Copilot so it can run entirely on a Windows laptop.

Date: 2026-10-10
Updated: 2026-10-10 07:33
Status: LIVE

Broadcast

The chipmaker for the whole AI industry just had the biggest quarter in its history, and a utility in Wyoming is building a private power system for one Google campus. Washington is now asking who pays for the grid those campuses need. On the desk, Microsoft showed that a real coding model can run on a laptop, if the laptop has enough memory.

Watch

• TSMC's third-quarter earnings call on October 15
• PJM's revised backstop procurement filing due October 29
• Whether GitHub Copilot's local routing ships on schedule

Stories

TSMC posts record third-quarter revenue of about $46.7 billion

TSMC said September revenue was about NT$511.86 billion, up 54.6 percent from September 2025. That brings third-quarter revenue to about NT$1.49 trillion, roughly US$46.7 billion and about 50 percent higher than a year earlier, above the US$44.6 to 45.8 billion the company had guided.
-- Nearly every frontier AI chip is made by TSMC, so its revenue is a direct read on how fast the cluster build-out is spending. A beat this large says the spending has not slowed.
2026-10-08 / TSMC (SEC Form 6-K) / chip / central / #tsmc-posts-record-third-quarter-revenue-of-about

Black Hills will build 564 MW of gas and a private microgrid for Google in Wyoming

Black Hills signed contracts running to 2048 to serve a planned Google data center in Cheyenne. It will invest $1.8 billion to build 564 megawatts of gas generation and will manage about 2.1 gigawatts of third-party resources through a privately managed microgrid. Google advanced $399 million for long-lead equipment, and service is due to start in late 2027.
-- A single data center campus is getting about 2.7 gigawatts of dedicated power, most of it on a private microgrid outside the normal grid. Hyperscalers are now building their own utilities.
2026-10-06 / Black Hills Corp. (SEC filing) / energy / central / #black-hills-will-build-564-mw-of-gas-and-a-priva

Energy Department tells FERC that PJM must keep data center costs off ratepayers

The Department of Energy filed a notice of intervention and statement of position with FERC backing the commission's order that PJM revise its Reliability Backstop Procurement. DOE said large new loads such as data centers should pay for the generation and infrastructure they need, and urged PJM to file revised tariff rules by October 29.
-- PJM serves 13 states and the largest cluster of data centers in the world. If the federal government makes data centers carry their own grid costs there, the price of central compute goes up.
2026-10-07 / U.S. Department of Energy / energy / central / #energy-department-tells-ferc-that-pjm-must-keep-

Microsoft puts GitHub Copilot's coding model on a Windows laptop

Microsoft and GitHub said a local version of MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, a 137-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 6.8 billion active parameters, now runs on-device on Nvidia RTX Spark PCs such as the Surface Laptop Ultra. Microsoft reports a peak of 75.5GB of memory at the full 256K context and prompt processing of 923.5 tokens per second at 64K. Copilot will route between local and cloud models automatically.
-- The most widely used coding assistant can now do real work with no cloud call and no inference charge. The catch is a laptop with 128GB of memory.
2026-10-09 / Microsoft Command Line / efficiency / local / #microsoft-puts-github-copilot-s-coding-model-on-

Axis
local [##########################----] central
Score: 85   clusters still winning   flat
TSMC's record quarter and Google's private gas-and-microgrid deal in Wyoming show the cluster's chips and power still being bought at record pace. Washington is now pushing to make those buyers pay their own way on the grid. Microsoft's on-device Copilot model is the strongest local signal of the week, but it needs a machine with more than 120GB of memory. The balance holds.

Forces

Line charts (0=local 100=central 2026-09-25 to 2026-10-10)

Market overlay (2026-09-11 to 2026-10-10)

Latest: BTC $82,740 / hashrate ~985.79 EH/s / token markers avg $5.2583/M / axis 85. These lines are different units. We compare timing, not dollars-to-hashrate.

Not shown: GPU cloud $/hour, hub electricity, miner hashprice, or lab cost per token -- none of those are a clean public feed.

Power and list prices
BTC $82,740 / hashrate ~986 EH/s. List-price gap (not a subsidy %): 100.0x list gap (blended) GPT-6 Luna -> Claude Fable 5.1 ($0.20/M to $20.00/M). (mempool.space + Coinbase/CoinGecko)

Marker prices (USD per 1M tokens; verified 2026-10-08; blended = (3*input + 1*output) / 4; -- = open/self-host or no single public list)

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