Investors hunting for a way to profit from artificial intelligence without betting on a single chatbot or chip designer keep circling back to the companies that make the AI boom physically possible. A new piece from The Motley Fool, published August 2, 2026 and syndicated to Yahoo Finance and AOL, pits two of them against each other: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM) and ASML (NASDAQ: ASML).
The two sit at different links in the same chain. TSMC is the contract manufacturer that actually fabricates advanced chips for other companies. ASML makes the lithography machines that fabs need to print circuitry onto silicon. Neither sells an AI product to consumers, but both take a cut of nearly every advanced chip built.
According to The Motley Fool, both have been "more-than-solid winners" over the last five years. The article cites TSMC's net income rising 251% in that period, with revenue up 165% — a gap worth noting, since profits growing faster than sales generally means a company is earning more on each dollar it brings in. The author describes the two as among their favorite stocks in the semiconductor supply chain.
The available source material does not include comparable five-year figures for ASML, nor does it disclose which of the two the article ultimately favors, so readers should treat the matchup as a framing device rather than a settled verdict. As always, a stock's past performance is not a forecast.
Why it matters: the AI story is usually told through software and headline chipmakers, but the money increasingly flows through a small number of upstream suppliers — and when so much depends on so few companies, their results become a proxy for the health of the entire AI buildout.