(Bloomberg) — Samsung Electronics Co. earned a far stronger-than-expected eight-fold leap in quarterly profit, underscoring robust demand for AI memory chips in the face of uncertainties triggered by war in the Middle East.
Customers led by cloud service providers are ramping up orders for high-bandwidth memory and other chips used in data centers to feed artificial intelligence services, lifting both volumes and margins at the chips-to-smartphones conglomerate.
Shares of Samsung, which had slumped from their February peak, jumped 5% in pre-market trading in Seoul on Tuesday, shaking off some of the fears that the US-Iran conflict may hurt the durability of spending on energy-guzzling AI hardware.
Samsung reported preliminary operating profit of 57.2 trillion won ($37.9 billion) in the March quarter — up 755% to hit a record — versus analysts’ average projection for 39.3 trillion won. Revenue climbed to 133 trillion won, against the average estimate of 116.8 trillion won. The company will release a full financial statement, including net income and divisional breakdowns, later this month.
“It’s all driven by memory and it’s stronger than what people anticipated,” said Sanjeev Rana, head of research at CLSA Securities Korea, estimating that memory’s contribution may be close to 90% of total operating profit. Supply is “very tight” for HBM and conventional DRAM products, he said.
Samsung dominates global memory supply along with SK Hynix Inc. and Micron Technology Inc. The trio has increasingly shifted production in recent years toward high-bandwidth memory used in Nvidia Corp.’s AI accelerators, tightening supply of conventional memory.
Samsung’s first-quarter operating profit dwarfs its performance in other quarters and blew past the 43.6 trillion won the company generated in all of 2025. South Korea’s semiconductor exports — a bellwether of global technology demand — soared 151.4% in March to a record $32.8 billion, government data show.
Analysts remain upbeat on South Korea’s biggest company, largely dismissing concerns about AI optimization by offerings such as Google’s TurboQuant or Anthropic’s Claude Mythos.
The average selling price of global DRAM surged 64% in the first quarter from the previous quarter, Citigroup analysts Peter Lee and Jayden Oh wrote in an April 2 report. For Samsung, Citigroup forecasts annual operating profit of 310 trillion won — or the equivalent of $206 billion — in 2026, saying it expects strong AI inference demand to sustain pricing.
Earlier this year, Samsung was first to commercially ship next-generation HBM4 to customers, following years of struggles and qualification delays that allowed rival SK Hynix to dominate the lucrative field. Samsung’s shares gained more than 120% last year, lagging SK Hynix’s more than 270% jump.
