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After the closing bell on Monday, tech behemoth Oracle (ORCL), probably feeling somewhat rebellious, missed its earnings estimate for fiscal 2026’s first quarter. The report was somewhat disappointing, posting $1.47 per share when analysts had been expecting $1.48. However, in a dramatic turn of events-because who doesn’t love a good plot twist-Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz, threw a wild prediction into the air: “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue will grow 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year,” she said, sounding like she might also predict that the moon will turn into a giant piece of blue cheese, just because why not. Oracle’s stock, predictably, surged more than 41% the following day, as if the heavens themselves had opened, and investors, gripped by the wild allure of AI, began scrambling for anything remotely connected to it.

The catalyst? A quarterly report so resplendent with numbers it could have lit up the Kremlin. Revenue of $14.9 billion-up 12%-and adjusted EPS of $1.47 (a 6% rise) arrived like a telegram from a long-lost uncle, brimming with unearned optimism. Yet the true marvel was not the numbers themselves, but the shadow they cast: a $455 billion backlog of contracts, a figure so vast it might have made Stalin reconsider his Five-Year Plan.

Meta, that most accomplished of social hosts, presides over a gathering of 3.48 billion daily active users, a figure that would make even the most ambitious of London hostesses green with envy. With its digital advertising empire, it shares the stage with Alphabet’s Google, a rivalry as polite as it is profitable. One might imagine Mr. Darcy himself poring over Meta’s AI-driven ad algorithms, for they are as refined as the latest gown at a ball.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) wears its anonymity like a well-worn coat. To the untrained eye, it is a factory of sand and fire, a place where raw elements are coaxed into the nervous systems of machines. But in the hush of its cleanrooms, where engineers toil like monks in a cathedral of circuitry, lies the beating heart of AI’s ascent. These chips-those tiny, unassuming slabs of silicon-are the loom on which the tapestry of machine learning is woven. Without them, even the most ambitious algorithms would wither like seedlings in a drought.