This week’s AI winners and losers
Daniel Howley· Technology Editor
Sat, July 18, 2026 at 6:46 PM GMT+5:30
4 min read
Yahoo Finance’s AI winners and losers provides a weekly snapshot of some of the biggest stories impacting the artificial intelligence industry. From chip manufacturers and model developers to software companies and politicians, we look at who has benefited from AI and who has stumbled
This week’s AI winners: TSMC and China’s Moonshot AI
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM) announcedblowout earnings on Thursday and said it will increase spending to expand its US footprint. Second quarter revenue jumped 36% year over year, while net income rocketed 77.4% higher
TSMC produces semiconductors for the world’s most influential tech companies, including Apple (AAPL), AMD (AMD), Nvidia (NVDA), and Qualcomm (QCOM). And the AI boom has paid off handsomely for the Taiwan-based manufacturer. Annual revenue has increased from $75.99 billion in 2022 to $122.56 billion in 2025
According to CFO Wendell Huang, TMSC’s Q2 results were supported by strong demand, which he expects to continue into the current quarter as tech companies seek as many AI chips as they can get
Moonshot AI
Moonshot AI on Friday revealed that its new Kimi K3 AI model has frontier-level capabilities. While it falls short in overall performance compared to state-of-the-art models like Anthropic’s (ANTH.PVT) Fable 5 and OpenAI’s (OPAI.PVT) GPT-5.6 Sol, K3 surpasses them on certain benchmark tests
The announcement shows how quickly China’s AI companies are catching up with the most well-funded organizations in the US, and points to the major differences between their approaches to AI dominance
Like China’s DeepSeek, Moonshot AI focuses on releasing open-weight models, or models that users can download for free and customize to their liking, while Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) focus on proprietary models that users must pay to access
China’s AI companies also generally undercut Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google on usage pricing, making them more appealing to businesses that are looking to take advantage of AI but don’t want to shell out for access to Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT, or Google’s Gemini
This week’s AI losers: IBM and the chip industry
IBM
Talk about a rough day. IBM (IBM) preannounced its Q2 earnings on Tuesday, warning investors that its revenue and earnings per share fell well below analysts’ expectations, as the company’s customers shifted their spending from its mainframe systems to AI servers and memory and storage chips
Analysts had expected Big Blue to report adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $3.02 on revenue of $17.86 billion, but the company says it came up short, posting adjusted EPS of $2.93 and revenue of $17.2 billion
