Samsung has reached a market capitalization of one trillion dollarswith its shares soaring more than 15% in a single day. There is only one other Asian company in that club: TSMC. And it is no coincidence that both manufacture chips. Of course, Samsung’s reality is a little more complex.
Why is it important. AI is changing the hardware hierarchy. Who controls the memory that powers data centers largely controls the rate at which the world can scale its AI models. Samsung has been the largest memory manufacturer on the planet for almost a decadeand that, in 2026, is literally worth a trillion.
The context. The memory chip business has long been quite cyclical, alternating periods of shortage with periods of overproduction and plummeting prices.
But AI has introduced a new variable. Data centers require huge amounts of HBM memory (High Bandwidth Memory) to run their workloads, and the bottleneck is structural: building new manufacturing capacity takes two to three years. That means the shortage isn’t going to be resolved anytime soon, and prices are going to remain high.
In figures. Samsung’s first quarter numbers:
- The operating profit has multiplied by eight that of the same period of the previous year.
- Revenue has reached an all-time high of 133.9 trillion Korean won.
- The semiconductor division has generated more than 90% of the company’s total profit.
Yes, but. The paradox that makes Samsung different from TSMC or NVIDIA is that it also manufactures smartphones and televisions. And those businesses buy the same memory chips that are now scarce and expensive. He boom that enriches its semiconductor division is cutting the margins of its consumer divisions. Samsung has become, in a way, its own internal rival.
Between the lines. This week’s stock market jump is not explained only by the quarterly results. An article from Bloomberg has made public that Apple has held talks with Samsung and Intel to manufacture chips for its devices on US soil, diversifying its dependence on TSMC.
If Samsung manages to win that contract, the impact on the semiconductor supply chain would be more than notable.
The big question. How long does this last? The bullish memory cycle has an expiration date: as soon as the construction of new factories increases the available supply, prices will fall again.
The only scenario in which this does not happen is if demand for AI continues to grow faster than installed capacity. Until now, that’s how it has been. But Samsung has fully sold out production capacity for this year alone, which gives an idea of the pressure on the system.
Featured image | Max Whitehead
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