Samsung Posts Record Quarter as AI Memory Crunch Drives Profit Up More Than 750%

Samsung Electronics posted its highest-ever quarterly operating profit in the first three months of 2026, with earnings climbing more than 750% from a year earlier to 57.2 trillion Korean won — eclipsing analysts' expectations and surpassing the company's own full-year 2025 profit figure in a single quarter.

The result, reported Thursday, was measured against an LSEG SmartEstimate of 55.28 trillion won. Revenue reached 133.9 trillion won, equivalent to roughly $89.96 billion, against an expected 132.69 trillion won — also a company record, up approximately 70% year over year.

The quarter's earnings extend a run of record-setting results that began in the final quarter of last year, when Samsung surpassed its previous operating profit record of 17.6 trillion won set in the third quarter of 2018.

The dominant driver was Samsung's Device Solutions division, which encompasses memory chips, semiconductor design, and foundry services. The DS division recorded operating profit of 53.7 trillion won in the quarter, compared with roughly 1 trillion won in the same period a year ago. Chip revenue reached 81.7 trillion won, up 225% from last year.

Samsung said in its earnings report that its memory business "surpassed its quarterly sales record by addressing high-value-added AI demand despite limited supply availability, with industry-wide memory price increases also a contributing factor."

The AI data center boom has placed extreme strain on global memory supply, constraining availability and pushing up prices across the sector. As chipmakers shift production capacity toward higher-margin AI applications, supply shortages have cascaded into consumer electronics markets, affecting prices for products including smartphones, PCs, and gaming consoles.

Samsung said it expects server memory demand to remain strong into the second half of 2026, citing continued expansion by hyperscalers accommodating AI adoption and accelerating interest in agentic AI workloads.

A key area of competition for Samsung is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM — a specialized chip architecture central to AI data center accelerators. The company has faced pressure in that segment from rival SK Hynix, which holds a leading position in the market.

According to data from Counterpoint Research, SK Hynix commanded a 57% revenue share of the HBM market in the fourth quarter of last year.

Samsung announced in February that it had begun shipping its first HBM4 chips to unnamed customers, nearly a year after SK Hynix began delivering its own HBM4 samples. HBM4 represents the sixth generation of the technology and is expected to serve as the primary AI memory chip in Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin architecture.

"Samsung has made improvements in HBM4 and the gap against SK Hynix is narrower versus previous generations of HBM," said Ray Wang, an analyst at SemiAnalysis who leads its memory coverage from Seoul. "Yet we continue to see SK Hynix leading the HBM race versus its peers," he added.

The record earnings land amid a broader surge in AI-driven capital expenditure across the technology sector. Alphabet on Wednesday updated its 2026 capex guidance to between $180 billion and $190 billion, while Meta raised its own to between $125 billion and $145 billion — spending commitments that are fueling the very memory constraints benefiting Samsung's bottom line.

For Samsung, closing the HBM gap with SK Hynix while sustaining record chip revenue will be the central challenge heading into the back half of the year, even as the structural tailwinds from AI infrastructure buildout show no immediate sign of softening.

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