Samsung quarterly profit surges to $80 billion on AI chip demand

Samsung Electronics just posted the kind of quarter that usually only shows up in investor fan fiction. Operating profit for the third quarter of 2026 hit a record 107.4 trillion won, approximately $80 billion, up 782.5% from the same period a year earlier. That makes Samsung the first South Korean company to clear 100 trillion won in operating profit in a single quarter. Where the money came from Samsung’s Device Solutions division, its semiconductor arm, accounted for nearly all of the quarter’s profit. The phones, TVs and appliances most consumers associate with the brand were supporting cast this time. The headline product is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. Think of a regular memory chip as a single-lane road feeding data to a processor. HBM stacks chips vertically and widens that road into a multi-lane highway, which is exactly what AI accelerators need to keep their processors fed. Enterprise-grade DRAM and SSD storage also pulled their weight. Data centers building out AI infrastructure need fast memory and fast storage, and they appear willing to pay up for both. Revenue climbed to 195 trillion won, a 126.6% increase year-over-year. That figure did land slightly below some a...