The chip industry has cashed in on the artificial-intelligence bonanza, sending the profits and stocks of companies like NVIDIA and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to unprecedented heights.

With President Trump's tariff threats and rising potential for a global economic slowdown, it is becoming harder to ignore how everything other than AI isn't doing all that well.

TSMC, the world's largest chip maker and an industry bellwether, on Thursday reinforced the sense that the industry's eggs are largely in the AI basket. It gave strong revenue guidance for the current quarter and maintained capital spending plans despite the potential disruption from tariffs. AI-chip revenue is expected to double this year, and Chief Executive C.C. Wei said in a call with analysts that it was destined for a compound annual growth rate of around 45% in the coming years.

That came a day after chip manufacturing equipment giant ASML said tariffs were leading to increased uncertainty. It reported first-quarter orders below analyst forecasts, spooking investors. But Chief Executive Christophe Fouquet said AI was "still the driver of the market," and suggested the company could come in at the upper range of its revenue guidance this year if it stays that way.

In one way, the optimism is understandable given that the biggest spenders on AI and the chips that drive it -- Meta, Alphabet's Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com -- haven't backed off from huge capital-spending plans.

Amazon chief Andy Jassy, whose company plans some $100 billion of capital spending this year, noted the "substantial capital investment" required by AI in a shareholder letter last week. Alphabet's Sundar Pichai also reaffirmed earlier this month his company's $75 billion of outlays planned for this year.

TSMC said its upbeat outlook factored in the Trump administration's recent banning of sales of chips that Nvidia developed for the Chinese market, which caused Nvidia to take an anticipated $5.5 billion charge this week. TSMC hasn't yet detected any change in its customers' behavior as a result of the tariffs, Wei said Thursday, either of them pulling forward orders ahead of expected tariffs or backing away because of a troubled outlook.

Yet that could reflect an obvious reality about the tariffs: nobody knows what their final shape will be. "At this stage, the purchasing behavior of consumers and corporates is yet to be determined across a landscape bracing for higher prices," Stifel analyst Brian Chin said in a note about TSMC's results.

It's also hard to be confident about the sustainability of the spending on AI that TSMC depends on in a world where some of the businesses that support it -- Meta, Google and Amazon's ads, in particular -- likely won't fare well if the global economy slides.

Chip-makers would be in much better shape if rising demand was spread across a broader base, like it was during the Covid pandemic. Back then, no one could get enough chips, whether for cars or computers or smartphones. (AI chips weren't yet an enormous market.) It was a well-diversified upswing.

This time is different. International Data Corp. expects smartphone shipments to grow by 2.3% this year. That is a fairly anemic level at a time when many in the industry hoped AI demand would prompt people to buy new devices.

Personal computers are on a similar trajectory -- shipments are expected to be up by 3.7% this year. Electric vehicles haven't been the golden ticket they seemed to be a few years ago. Sales of chips for the industrial end market and for internet-of-things devices have been weak in recent years, too.

The AI boom has helped paper over a lot of that.

But with tariffs and export restrictions in play, investors and chip makers shouldn't be so sanguine about AI's ability to keep filling a revenue cup left emptier by other, more sluggish areas.