Samsung posted record revenue growth, driven by demand for AI-linked memory.

Chip shortages lifted prices, boosting earnings across the memory segment. This also touches on aspects of portfolio.

The AI boom strengthened Samsung’s position in the high-bandwidth memory industry.

Samsung Electronics reported an over eight-fold surge in first-quarter operating profits on Thursday, hitting a latest record and beating analysts’ estimates on the explosive growth of its chip business.

Here are Samsung’s first-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:

Revenue: 133.9 trillion Korean won ($89.96 billion) vs. 132.69 trillion won expected

Operating profit: 57.2 trillion won vs. 55.28 trillion won expected

The South Korean digital systems giant’s quarterly earnings climbed more than 750% from a year earlier to a fresh record. The business also posted record revenue, up about 70% year over year. 

The profits came in line with Samsung’s own estimates of 57.2 trillion won and exceeded its full-year 2025 profits of 43.6 trillion won.

The earnings extend momentum from the final quarter of last year, when Samsung surpassed its prior record of 17.6 trillion won set in the third quarter of 2018.

Samsung’s record earnings came on the strength of its chip business. Besides its smartphone business and semiconductor foundry services, the firm is a major producer of memory chips.

The firm’s chip business has emerged as a major beneficiary of the global AI data center boom, which has constrained supply and driven up prices of memory chips used in data centers and electronics such as smartphones, PCs and game consoles. 

The corporation commented in an earnings report that it expects server memory demand to remain strong into the second half of the year as hyperscalers continue to accommodate AI adoption and demand for agentic AI accelerates.

Chip strength

Samsung’s chip business, also known as its DS (Device Solutions) division, encompasses its memory chip, semiconductor design and foundry business units. 

The division posted an operating income of 53.7 trillion Korean won in the first quarter, compared with just about 1 trillion Korean won in the same period last year.  Chip revenue reached 81.7 trillion Korean won, up 225% from last year.

The strong showing comes as Samsung continues to expand its high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, business, a key component in AI data center chips.

Chipmakers such as Nvidia — the world’s most valuable firm — have driven demand for HBM, amid limited supplies.

As manufacturers prioritize production for higher-margin AI applications, supply constraints have pushed up prices for memory used in consumer electronics.

In its earnings report, Samsung commented that its memory business “surpassed its quarterly sales record by addressing high-value-added AI demand despite limited supply availability, with industry-wide memory price increases also a contributing factor.”

Samsung has faced strong competition in the HBM space, losing an early lead to rival SK Hynix.

Samsung has been racing to catch up to SK Hynix in the lucrative innovation, announcing in February that it had started shipping its first HBM, on the other hand4 chips to unnamed customers, nearly a year after SK Hynix began delivering its first HBM4 samples.

HBM4 is the sixth generation of HBM tech and the most advanced version to date. It is expected to be the main AI memory chip used in Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin architecture, designed for powerful AI workloads in data centers. 

“Samsung has made improvements in HBM4 and the gap against SK Hynix is narrower versus previous generations of HBM,” commented Ray Wang, analyst at SemiAnalysis, where he leads the company’s memory coverage from Seoul.

“Yet we continue to see SK Hynix leading the HBM race versus its peers,” he added. 

SK Hynix continued to lead HBM with a 57, according to data from Counterpoint Research% revenue industry share in the final quarter of last year.