Samsung's Net Profit Soars as AI Demand Fuels Record Chip Earnings

By Kwanwoo Jun

Samsung Electronics posted a nearly sixfold surge in first-quarter net profit, on record earnings in its core semiconductor business driven by explosive demand for advanced chips amid the artificial-intelligence boom.

The world's largest memory-chip maker is widely expected to continue benefiting from tight supply and strong prices of memory products as the global AI-infrastructure buildout continues.

Net profit for the three months ended March reached a record 47.225 trillion won, equivalent to $31.72 billion, a 474% increase from the year earlier, the South Korean technology company said Thursday. That beat a FactSet-compiled consensus estimate of 40.591 trillion won.

Revenue also hit a record, jumping 69% to 133.873 trillion won. Operating profit increased more than eightfold to an all-time high of 57.233 trillion won. Both figures were largely in line with the company's preliminary estimates.

Samsung's chip-making division drove the stellar earnings growth, posting a record operating profit of 53.7 trillion won. That accounted for more than 90% of the company's total earnings for the quarter, outweighing the sluggish performance in other segments. Higher prices of DRAM and NAND--the two main types of memory chips widely used in electronic goods--pressured Samsung's smartphone and home-appliance businesses by making key inputs and finished products pricier.

Analysts largely see Samsung, along with other memory-chip makers, extending record earnings through 2026.

Meritz Securities analysts Kim Sun-woo and Woo Seo-hyun said earlier this month that Samsung's operating profit could rise to 73 trillion won in the second quarter, 90 trillion won in the third quarter and 104 trillion won in the fourth quarter.

Samsung is set to benefit from sustained AI inference memory demand, with prices of its DDR5 RDIMM--a high-capacity, high-speed module designed for AI servers--likely to accelerate in the second half, Citigroup's Peter Lee and Jayden Oh said in a recent note.

The company's stock rose 0.9% after the earnings results, bringing its year-to-date gains to around 90%.

Samsung in February said it became the first in the world to mass-produce the most advanced high-bandwidth memory chips, known as HBM4, for AI applications. It plans to provide upgraded HBM4E samples later this year. It is also manufacturing Groq 3 language processing units--the latest AI inference chips--for Nvidia, with shipments due to start in the second half of 2026.

Write to Kwanwoo Jun at kwanwoo.jun@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 29, 2026 20:45 ET (00:45 GMT)