Samsung Electronics said that its latest quarterly operating profit was nearly 20 times higher than last year’s, spurred by a seemingly insatiable demand for memory chips used in data centers for artificial intelligence.
The preliminary results for April through June, announced by the South Korean tech giant on Tuesday, underscore how the staggering investments that companies are making to build computing infrastructure for A.I. continue to propel earnings for memory chip makers to record levels.
Samsung said it generated an operating profit of 89.4 trillion South Korean won, or roughly $58 billion, in the second quarter. That was well above the 4.7 trillion won it earned in the same quarter last year, and more than it earned in 2024 and 2025 combined. The company’s revenue also more than doubled in the quarter, to about $112 billion.
Despite the robust results, Samsung’s shares fell more than 8 percent in Seoul after the announcement, a sign of how lofty investors’ expectations have become. Still, Samsung’s stock has more than doubled this year, driven by A.I. mania.
The Kospi, South Korea’s benchmark stock index, set a series of records recently, outpacing major markets around the world. It has more than doubled over the past year, and analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that nearly 90 percent of those gains have been generated by Samsung and SK Hynix, another memory chip maker. Both Samsung and SK Hynix reached trillion-dollar market valuations this year. “The equity market has never been more concentrated,” the analysts wrote.
The mania has drawn in lots of individual investors, generating increasingly gut-wrenching volatility in recent months. Although the Goldman strategists warned of a “bumpy path given inherent memory-sector volatility,” they forecast a 20 percent gain for the Kospi in the second half of the year, buoyed by “exceptionally strong” earnings growth.
The Kospi fell more than 5 percent on Tuesday, dragged down by Samsung.
High-bandwidth memory chips are a critical component in feeding data necessary for training A.I. systems and running large-language models, but the surge in data center spending has exhausted much of the world’s supply for these semiconductors. This has allowed Samsung, SK Hynix and other memory makers to raise prices and maintain wide profit margins.
On Monday, SK Hynix began a U.S. share sale worth a potential $28 billion, which would make it the second-largest new share issue on record, after SpaceX’s blockbuster $86 billion public offering last month.
Sanjeev Rana, head of Korea research at CLSA, an Asia-based investment group, said he expects the supply of high-bandwidth memory chips to remain tight through 2028, when new semiconductor factories currently under construction come online and increase production.
High-performance memory chips are essential for reducing the energy costs of running data centers and improving their capabilities.
South Korea produces around 60 percent of the world’s memory chips. Yet many worry that the gains will flow primarily to a handful of companies, such as Samsung, with little spillover to the broader economy.
Earlier this year, Samsung headed off a strike by agreeing to pay employees in its semiconductor division, including assembly-line operators, an annual bonus of up to $400,000 next year if certain profit targets are met.
