In a historic upset that signals how AI is redrawing the semiconductor landscape, SK Hynix just beat Samsung Electronics in annual operating profit for the first time ever. The memory chipmaker posted a record 47.2 trillion won ($35.4 billion) in operating profit for 2025, edging past Samsung's 43.6 trillion won—a stunning reversal driven almost entirely by SK Hynix's early bet on high-bandwidth memory chips that power AI data centers. The milestone marks a fundamental shift in South Korea's tech hierarchy and underscores how specialized AI components are creating new winners in the chip wars.
SK Hynix just pulled off what seemed impossible a decade ago—it beat Samsung Electronics in annual operating profit. The two South Korean tech giants released their 2025 earnings this week, and the numbers tell a story of how quickly AI can reshape entire industries. SK Hynix posted record operating profit of 47.2 trillion won for the full year, narrowly surpassing Samsung's 43.6 trillion won, according to their respective earnings reports.
The comparison is striking when you consider Samsung operates across consumer electronics, smartphones, and contract chip manufacturing, while SK Hynix focuses almost entirely on memory chips. Samsung's memory segment alone generated about 24.9 trillion won in operating profit during 2025—meaning SK Hynix's specialized focus on AI-optimized memory nearly doubled that figure. It's a remarkable turnaround for a company that SK Telecom acquired for roughly $3 billion back in 2012, when it was struggling to compete with Samsung's dominance.
What changed? High-bandwidth memory, or HBM. These specialized chips stack multiple memory layers vertically to deliver the ultra-fast data transfer speeds that AI processors need. Nvidia uses them extensively in its data center GPUs, and SK Hynix locked in early as Nvidia's primary HBM supplier. That strategic positioning paid off massively as generative AI exploded and hyperscalers rushed to build out inference infrastructure.
