Samsung's chip division profits surpass 40 years of combined earnings, beating Nvidia

Samsung's semiconductor division is on track to achieve a staggering milestone: its projected profits for 2026 are expected to surpass the total combined profits of its entire 40-year history. According to a report from Tom's Hardware, the surge is fueled by rapidly rising prices for memory and storage components, particularly HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) and SSDs, which are critical for AI training and inference workloads. The division notched a 19x increase in quarterly profit, propelling Samsung past Nvidia to claim the title of the world's most profitable company.

This profit explosion highlights a fundamental shift in the AI hardware landscape. While Nvidia has dominated headlines with its GPU sales, Samsung's memory chips have become equally indispensable. Every AI server runs on HBM, and inventory shortages have driven prices—and margins—skyrocketing. For tech professionals, this signals that memory and storage supply chains will remain under extreme pressure, impacting costs for cloud providers and enterprise AI deployments. Samsung’s success also underscores the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry, where short-term supply constraints can deliver outsized gains.