Chips Cashed In on Earnings Night: Texas Instruments and IBM Beat, Lam Set a Record — and Las Vegas Sands Missed

NEW YORK

Meta and Tesla got the headlines Wednesday evening, but the more honest read on the AI economy came from the undercard. Texas Instruments, IBM and Lam Research all reported after the close, and together they described the same boom from three different altitudes: the chipmaker selling into data centers nearly doubled that business, the equipment maker posted the biggest quarter in its history, and the enterprise software giant closed the deals it had been promising. Investors, characteristically, rewarded one, punished one, and couldn't make up their minds about the third.

Texas Instruments: the broad beat

Texas Instruments delivered the cleanest print of the night. The Dallas chipmaker earned $2.62 per share in the third quarter, beating the Zacks consensus estimate of $2.40, on revenues of $6.06 billion — up 28% from $4.74 billion a year ago and ahead of the $5.94 billion consensus tracked by MarketBeat. It was the third time in four quarters TI has topped both estimates, according to Zacks. The engine was data centers: revenue from that business surged about 95% and now accounts for 13% of the company's total mix, with record revenue in the industrial end market as well, according to the Motley Fool's summary of the earnings call. Management guided fourth-quarter revenue to a range of $5.8 billion to $6.3 billion.

TI also used the call to talk like a company that thinks the cycle has legs. The company has returned $5.8 billion to shareholders over the past 12 months and reached its 23rd consecutive year of dividend increases, according to the Fool's transcript summary, and management flagged humanoid robotics as a content opportunity of $500 to $1,000 per unit starting in 2027 — a neat echo of Tesla's Optimus production starting across the industry on the same evening. Executives did note lead times extending on tools, which may affect the timing of capacity expansion. The stock was up 2.47% on the day, according to the Fool. Everhint's after-hours sector review called TI's raised outlook "a positive signal for chip demand broadly."

IBM: the whipsaw

IBM's night was two nights in one. Profit and revenue both rose in the third quarter, as around two-thirds of the deals the company had meant to close in the previous quarter were wrapped up, according to Dow Jones reporting via Morningstar. The stock initially surged as high as 11% in after-hours trading — then fell into the red and was recently down 4.8% at $239.50, Morningstar reported. Zacks counted IBM among the evening's beats. IBM also raised its forecast for full-year free-cash-flow growth to more than $1 billion, according to a market roundup from KuCoin summarizing the reports. What flipped the stock is the kind of thing that only gets settled on the call and in the footnotes on Thursday; the reported fact pattern is simply that the same report produced an 11% spike and a 5% drop within the same evening session.

Lam Research: record numbers, falling stock

Lam Research supplied the night's cleanest lesson in how earnings season actually works. Artificial-intelligence demand in Asia propelled a more-than-50% increase in fiscal first-quarter sales, according to Dow Jones, and revenue hit a record $8.22 billion for the quarter, according to KuCoin's roundup. Guidance for the second quarter came with a midpoint in line with analyst expectations. The stock fell 6.3% anyway, to $244.50, per Morningstar. Everhint's after-hours analysis filed the move where it belongs: Lam "beat but sold off — a valuation/sentiment issue rather than a fundamental one." When a stock has already priced in the boom, a record quarter is merely the admission price.

And the Vegas miss

The clear underperformer of the evening was a hometown name. Las Vegas Sands missed earnings per share by $0.19 and revenue fell short, with shares down 4%, according to Everhint's earnings roundup, which concluded that the Macau recovery "is clearly not meeting elevated expectations." It was the weak spot in what Everhint otherwise scored a broadly strong night — technology and semiconductors "broadly strong," industrials and regional banks mostly beating. For a city whose locals trade on both sides of the Sands story — as employees, neighbors and competitors — a Macau-driven miss is a reminder that the center of gravity for the company's growth sits nine time zones away, even when the earnings call happens on a Wednesday night in America.

Put the undercard together with the main event — our Meta and Tesla breakdown — and the evening's message coheres: demand for AI hardware and the software around it is real, broad and still accelerating, and the market has moved on to grading the spending rather than the promise. Texas Instruments at plus-28% revenue is what the boom looks like in analog. Lam's selloff is what it costs to have already believed in it. More markets coverage on the News front.