Samsung Electronics just posted the most profitable quarter in its history, blowing past its 2018 record with 20.1 trillion won ($14 billion) in operating profit - a staggering 200% jump year-over-year. The South Korean tech giant is riding an unprecedented wave of AI-driven demand for high-bandwidth memory chips, turning a global shortage into a financial windfall that's reshaping the semiconductor landscape. Coming just a day after rival SK Hynix posted its own record earnings, Samsung's blowout results confirm what industry insiders have been whispering for months: the AI memory gold rush is real, and it's minting money faster than anyone predicted.
Samsung Electronics just rewrote its own profit playbook. The company's Q4 2025 earnings, released Thursday, shattered its previous record from seven years ago with operating profit climbing to 20.1 trillion won - a figure that seemed impossible when Samsung was struggling through a memory glut just 18 months back. Revenue surged 24% to 93.8 trillion won ($65.58 billion), beating LSEG SmartEstimate consensus and confirming Samsung's earlier guidance.
The story behind these numbers is less about Samsung's execution and more about a fundamental supply-demand mismatch reshaping the entire semiconductor industry. High-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips that power AI data centers, has become the tech world's most sought-after commodity. Nvidia, AMD, and other AI chipset makers can't get enough of it, and that desperation is translating directly to Samsung's bottom line.
Samsung's memory division set all-time records for both quarterly revenue and operating profit, the company disclosed in its earnings report. The surge was "driven by an overall market price surge, sales of high-bandwidth memory and other high-value-added products," Samsung stated. Translation: HBM prices are through the roof, and Samsung is capitalizing on every wafer it can produce.
