Thursday Brief: Anthropic’s Cash Flow, TSMC’s Record and Jio’s Debt-Heavy IPO

October 15, 2026 Aaron Harme

Anthropic told investors it turned cash-flow positive in a quarter when its growth rate fell sharply, and the IPO filing will put both in front of the public. TSMC, which makes the chips the AI build-out runs on, posted another record and raised the bar for the fourth quarter.

India’s Jio priced the country’s biggest IPO in rupees, with most of the money headed to lenders. SportsGrid is for sale after losing two sportsbook clients, and Fox’s Roku deal cleared its shareholder votes and now waits on the Justice Department.

In this Brief

Anthropic’s third quarter brought positive cash flow and a much slower growth rate
TSMC posted record profit for a sixth straight quarter and guided higher
Jio’s IPO raises up to $3.2 billion, and about 91% of it repays debt
SportsGrid is on the market after FanDuel and BetMGM stopped paying for programming
Fox and Roku shareholders approved the $22 billion deal, and the Justice Department review is next

Anthropic’s third quarter: cash-flow positive, growth slowing

Setup: Anthropic told investors its third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion and that it was cash-flow positive, meaning more cash came in than went out, figures first reported by the Financial Times. CNBC reports Anthropic’s earlier quarters at $4.7 billion and about $11.6 billion, citing people familiar, so growth went from about 2.5 times in one quarter to about 45% in the next. Axios counts more than $500 billion of planned infrastructure and computing spending over the next decade.

The $1.70 of revenue per computing dollar the FT reported describes a company at today’s size, while the half-trillion in spending is sized to the growth rate it just left behind.

Longer cut: Anthropic’s IPO Pitch Rests on a $1.70 Ratio.

TSMC’s sixth straight record

Setup: TSMC’s third-quarter release shows revenue of NT$1.49 trillion, $46.72 billion by its own conversion, and net income of NT$763 billion, up 68.7%. TSMC is a foundry, the company that manufactures chips Nvidia, Apple and AMD design. CNBC reports TSMC logged record profit for a sixth straight quarter, that high-performance computing, mostly AI and data-center chips, made up 68% of revenue, and that construction of its second Arizona fab is complete, with mass production set for the third quarter of 2027. Fourth-quarter guidance is $52.3 billion to $54.3 billion.

Free cash flow was NT$476.56 billion, about 3.4 times a year earlier by CNBC’s figures, enough to fund its own build-out from operations.

Jio’s IPO mostly pays off debt

Setup: TechCrunch reports Jio, India’s largest telecom operator with more than 524 million subscribers, set a price band of ₹1,065 to ₹1,119 a share for an offering open Oct. 21 to 23, valuing it at about $108 billion at the top. Up to ₹275 billion of the proceeds repays debt. CNBC puts the raise at up to ₹302 billion, about $3.2 billion, the largest Indian IPO in rupees and second in dollars behind Hyundai Motor India’s $3.3 billion.

Jio posted a June-quarter net profit of ₹77.6 billion, about $816 million, up 9%, per the prospectus TechCrunch reviewed, so the debt it’s paying down sits against a business that already earns money every quarter.

SportsGrid is for sale

Setup: Front Office Sports reports SportsGrid, the sports betting video network, has been pitched to potential buyers since this summer by Telos Advisors, after revenue declined from 2022. FanDuel’s deal ended in mid-2025, a source told FOS, and BetMGM chose not to renew in 2024. In a 2022 release, SportsGrid called its arrangement with BetMGM a “media-as-a-service model.”

Under that model the sportsbooks paid for the programming, so the two departures took revenue with them, and the recovery the bankers are pitching depends on finding new buyers for the same shows.

Longer cut: SportsGrid Is for Sale After Losing the Sportsbooks That Paid for It.

Fox’s Roku deal clears its votes

Setup: Variety reports shareholders of Fox and Roku approved Fox’s $22 billion acquisition on Wednesday. Each Roku share becomes $96 in cash plus 0.9693 of a Fox Class A share, a package valued at $160. The Justice Department issued a second request for documents on Sept. 8, and both companies expect to close in the first half of 2027.

The merger agreement has Fox paying Roku about $1.24 billion if antitrust law blocks the deal, the largest dollar figure the contract attaches to any single risk.

Longer cut: Fox and Roku shareholders approve Fox’s $22 billion Roku acquisition.

Also noted

McKinsey will put some entry-level candidates through a 10-minute conversation with an AI-simulated client, with humans in the room doing the grading, The Verge reports, citing the Wall Street Journal.
Axios reports the FTC sent civil investigative demands, a kind of subpoena, to OpenAI and Anthropic seeking documents about safety incidents, citing a person familiar.
Modal says the AI computing startup raised $750 million at a $15.75 billion valuation after crossing $1 billion in annualized revenue, with its code sandboxes for AI agents at $300 million of that.
TechCrunch reports Deezer is building a toggle that removes AI-generated tracks from search results, due before the end of the year.

Sources

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