Samsung’s chip unit posts a 250-fold profit surge as the AI memory shortage deepens

7:00 AM ET · July 31, 2026

Samsung Electronics said its semiconductor arm posted operating income of 89.2 trillion won, roughly $62 billion, in the June quarter, more than 250 times what the unit earned a year earlier, as the artificial intelligence buildout’s appetite for high bandwidth memory chips outstripped supply and let Samsung push through steep price increases. The company said it now expects the memory shortage to persist and even worsen, stretching into 2028 rather than easing next year as some analysts had hoped, a reversal that reflects how much AI training and inference infrastructure now depends on memory rather than just compute. Samsung said major customers, including Nvidia, are responding by seeking long term, multiyear supply contracts at elevated prices to lock in access to components that have become a genuine bottleneck for data center buildouts, a dynamic that mirrors the advanced packaging capacity crunch chipmakers like TSMC are separately racing to solve. The results landed alongside a broader rally in Asian chip stocks, with South Korea’s Kospi index, powered by Samsung and rival SK Hynix, posting its biggest gain in nearly four months on the same day. The scale of the swing underscores how directly memory chip economics have become tied to AI infrastructure spending: a shortage that looked like a temporary supply hiccup a year ago is now being described by Samsung itself as a multiyear structural feature of the AI buildout rather than a cycle that will simply correct on its own.