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The AI build-out has pulled a familiar sleeper to the front of the chip industry.
For years Samsung Electronics’ memory division sat behind the flashier logic names in the AI story.
On Thursday morning Seoul time, the company’s own guidance filing rewrote that story in a few lines.
Samsung said its third-quarter 2026 operating profit will come in at roughly 107.4 trillion won (about $80.2 billion), on sales of about 195 trillion won. In the filing the company put the ranges at 107.3 to 107.5 trillion won for operating profit and 194 to 196 trillion won for sales.
The 100 trillion won bar had never been cleared in a single quarter by any South Korean company before, The Kyunghyang Shinmun reported.
Operating profit was up 782.5 percent from a year earlier and sales rose 126.6 percent. Only Saudi Arabia’s state oil producer Aramco has reported a comparable quarterly haul in recent years.
For comparison, Nvidia’s previously recorded $63.7 billion quarterly operating profit in Q2 was the highest among global big tech companies.
Memory, not phones, is doing the lifting
Samsung’s semiconductor arm is carrying the quarter. Analysts quoted by The Korea Times estimated the memory business alone generated around 110 trillion won in operating profit, with the period marking the first full contribution from HBM4, the high-bandwidth memory Samsung supplies for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin AI accelerator platform.
Meritz Securities analyst Kim Sun-woo told The Korea Times that the beat was no accident: “Despite an unfavorable business environment caused by the sharp appreciation of the Korean won, the company’s earnings were driven by its robust pricing strategy.”
The handset side is heading the other way. Samsung’s Device Experience unit, which makes its phones and consumer electronics, is projected to post an operating loss of between 1.1 trillion and 2.64 trillion won for a second straight quarter, according to the same report.
What investors see next
The preliminary filing does not break results out by business segment. The previous quarterly record of 89.4 trillion won was set only three months earlier in Q2 2026, SamMobile noted, so the actual mix between memory, foundry and consumer units is what analysts will scrutinize when the final numbers land.
Samsung is scheduled to publish its final third-quarter earnings on October 29.
