South Korea's Samsung Electronics reported a sharp rise in third-quarter profit on Thursday, adding to signs that the memory chip business has become one of the hottest corners of the global technology industry this year.
The company posted operating profit exceeding 107 trillion won for the quarter, according to South Korean broadcaster SBS, and set its total third-quarter cash dividend at 30 trillion won, amounting to 4,601 won per share. The results land in the same week that memory chip stocks around the world, from SK Hynix to SanDisk to Micron, have been rallying hard on Wall Street, a sign that the surge in demand is being felt broadly across the industry rather than at any single company.
That demand has been driven largely by the buildout of artificial intelligence data centers, which require enormous quantities of high-performance memory chips to train and run large AI models. As technology companies in the United States and elsewhere have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building out AI infrastructure, chipmakers that supply the memory going into those data centers have seen orders and prices climb.
The results also arrive against a backdrop of significant domestic news in South Korea. President Lee Jae-myung attended a memorial service in Seoul on Thursday marking four years since the Itaewon crowd crush, telling attendees that the government would work to ensure citizens do not suffer similar losses again. Separately, the government announced plans for new public housing districts in six areas of Gyeonggi Province near Seoul, including Gimpo, Guri and Hanam, intended to add more than 76,000 households.
Investors will be watching whether other major memory chip makers report similarly strong results in the coming weeks, which would confirm that the current boom extends well beyond any one company.
Why is Samsung's chip business doing so well right now?
Global demand for memory chips has surged as technology companies build out artificial intelligence data centers, which require large volumes of high-performance memory.