Samsung rides high on AI boom, cautions global headwinds ahead

“The ongoing AI boom is expected to continue driving favourable market conditions across the industry” in the first quarter of 2026, Korean giant Samsung said in a statement. This statement signifies the company’s optimism, as it reported record-breaking numbers.As the race to develop artificial intelligence strains chip supply and drives up costs, Samsung Electronics reported that its operating profit more than tripled to a record high in the fourth quarter and predicted robust chip demand going forward.
The leading memory chipmaker in the world has tremendous pricing power, as evidenced by the results, and its profit growth is expected to pick up speed this quarter. However, the company also issued a caution for the volatility ahead as a result of factors including tariffs.
In morning trading, rival SK Hynix’s shares increased 3.7%, while Samsung’s shares, which have risen nearly 40% this year, increased 1.2%.For the October–December period, Samsung reported an operational profit of $13.98 billion, up from 6.49 trillion won a year earlier and consistent with its expectation of 20 trillion won.

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In comparison to the same period last year, the South Korean company’s revenue increased by 24% to 93.8 trillion won.

Samsung’s primary cash cow, its chip division, saw a 470% increase in operating profit to a record high of 16.4 trillion won in the fourth quarter compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile, the company’s mobile profit fell by 10% to 1.9 trillion won due to rising chip prices.Due to the lack of memory chips, the display industry also predicts that demand for smartphones will decline in the current quarter and that consumers will seek price reductions.

Due to strong sales of its main client, Apple’s iPhone 17 series, its display business profit more than doubled to 2 trillion won.

Samsung Electronics announced on Thursday that it is on schedule to start shipping its HBM4, or next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, in the current quarter. Analysts anticipate that Nvidia will receive the processors first.

After experiencing supply delays that negatively impacted its earnings and share price last year, Samsung has been attempting to catch up with its crosstown rival SK Hynix, a major producer of the cutting-edge memory chips essential for Nvidia’s AI accelerators.

After reporting fourth-quarter earnings that more than doubled to a record, SK Hynix announced on Thursday that large-scale manufacturing of its next-generation HBM had started to satisfy client requests.

Conventional memory chips, which are used in PCs and cellphones as well as increasingly in data centres, are in short supply because of the race to construct AI infrastructure, which forced chipmakers to shift manufacturing capacity towards high-bandwidth memory for AI servers.