Morning brief: TSMC record quarter raises capex, guidance and Arizona

The AI build-out's main supplier keeps breaking records — and just re-upped. TSMC, the Taiwanese company that manufactures chips for Nvidia, Apple and most of the AI industry, reported its fifth straight record quarter on Thursday: revenue of $40.2 billion, up 33.7% year on year, with net income up 77.4%. It also raised this year's investment budget to $60–64 billion, guided next quarter's revenue higher still ($44.6–45.8 billion), and CEO C.C. Wei announced another $100 billion for its Arizona plants — taking the committed total there to $265 billion. Factories on that scale are built for demand measured in years, not quarters.

Rates: the ECB goes first, next Thursday. The 23 July meeting is the ECB's first since June's surprise hike took the deposit rate to 2.25%. The Fed follows on 29 July, and after June's soft US inflation print, futures markets still price a hold. For savers the mechanics haven't changed: while central-bank rates stay up, so do the rates brokers pay on uninvested cash.

eToro turned the memory-chip story into a product. Days after rebuilding its app around AI, eToro added an "AI-Memory" Smart Portfolio — a ready-made basket of 20 companies across the memory value chain, from Micron and SK hynix to Kioxia and TSMC itself. A Smart Portfolio is a themed bundle bought in one click; it is still an equity bet on a single theme, and whether any theme belongs in your portfolio is your call, not ours.

BitPay got its MiCA licence — through the Netherlands. The Dutch regulator AFM authorised BitPay B.V. on Wednesday as a crypto-asset service provider, letting the payments firm passport its services across all 27 EU states. Until now it had operated under the Dutch central bank's anti-money-laundering supervision only; the company says stablecoin payments — mostly in USDC — are its fastest-growing volume. One more name for our running list of MiCA-licensed platforms.

And the deadline we're watching: Revolut. From 30 July — under two weeks away — Revolut starts bouncing any USDT sent to it, and on 31 August it converts whatever is still on the account into your base currency, with no opt-out. What that means and the three ways out are in our Revolut USDT piece.

Sources below — this is a summary of what has been published, not investment advice.