Samsung Electronics recently released its preliminary quarterly financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025, showing remarkable performance growth. The operating profit for this quarter reached 20 trillion South Korean won (approximately 14.6 billion US dollars), a year-on-year increase of 208%, far exceeding the market expectation of 18 trillion South Korean won. This performance also set a new record for the company's highest operating profit in a single quarter. At the same time, Samsung's sales revenue for the same period reached 93 trillion South Korean won, an increase of 23% year-on-year, and has broken through the 80 trillion South Korean won threshold for the second consecutive quarter.

The main reason for Samsung's sharp profit increase is the strong demand for high-performance memory chips from AI data centers. High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is in short supply and has become a standard component for AI chips from companies such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Broadcom. In addition, the use of DDR5 DRAM in AI servers is rapidly increasing, with usage per machine being 3 to 5 times that of traditional servers. To meet this growing demand, Samsung and SK Hynix have proposed plans to raise DRAM prices by 60%-70% for the first quarter of 2026, a rise that marks a new high in many years.

Market forecasts suggest that the price of DDR5 will increase by 40% quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter of 2026, and another 20% in the second quarter, indicating that the storage chip industry is about to enter a "super cycle" where both volume and prices are rising. After a two-year downturn from 2023 to 2024, Samsung significantly reduced its capital expenditures, but the large-scale deployment of AI training clusters since the second half of 2025 has completely reversed the supply-demand relationship.

For example, the NVIDIA GB200NVL72 system requires 1.5TB of HBM3E per machine, while cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta exceeded 10 billion US dollars in AI capital expenditures in 2025. Moreover, China's "East Data West Computing" policy and investment in domestic AI chips have further increased market demand.

Although Samsung did not disclose detailed contributions from each business unit in its preliminary financial report, the market generally believes that the semiconductor division (DS) is the main source of profit. With the gradual commercial deployment of large models such as GPT-5, Gemini3, and Claude4, AI server shipments are expected to grow by more than 80% year-on-year, and the demand for HBM and DDR5 will continue to be tight.

Analysts said that if the price increase trend continues, Samsung's semiconductor profits for the entire year of 2026 are expected to exceed 100 trillion South Korean won, regaining its position as the global leader in the semiconductor market.

Key Points:   

🌟 Samsung's operating profit for Q4 2025 reached 20 trillion South Korean won, an increase of 208% year-on-year, setting a new historical record.   

📈 The surge in demand for high-performance memory chips from AI data centers has driven a recovery in the semiconductor market.   

🚀 It is expected that AI server shipments will increase by more than 80% in 2026, and the demand for HBM and DDR5 chips will remain tight.