(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 markets roiled 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 have slumped from their February peak, rose as much as 4.9% during early morning trading in Seoul on Tuesday, shaking off some of the fears that the US-Iran conflict is hurting the durability of spending on energy-guzzling AI hardware. Shares of rival SK Hynix Inc. gained 5.3%.
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, on April 30.
“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.
Korea’s largest company dominates global memory supply along with SK Hynix and Micron Technology Inc. The trio has increasingly shifted production in recent years toward HBM 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.
“Samsung is in the midst of a sharp profit recovery cycle,” wrote Morgan Stanley analysts Shawn Kim, Ryan Kim, Duan Liu and Cindy Huang in a report. “Significant upside exists once we adjust to earnings growth in a period of unprecedented capacity constraints.”
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.
“It’s fast becoming a case of ‘Turbowhatever’, with investors glossing over the threat of the Google compression technology,” said Andrew Jackson, head of Japanese equity strategy at Ortus Advisors.