The world’s largest semiconductor-maker is reaping the rewards of a global memory chip shortage driven by AI demand so rapacious that it’s making everyone else miserable.

Samsung said in its latest earnings report that it saw record profits, up almost 500% from the same first quarter last year, at $31.72 billion. The figure was boosted by a nearly 50-times jump in revenue for its chip business. 

The company has sold out all of its memory production capacity for the rest of this year and says that shortages, which are driving up prices of everything from laptops to smartphones to external storage devices to gaming consoles, are going to get worse in 2027. 

In an investor call for its earnings report, one of the company’s memory chip executives, Kim Jaejune, said, “Based solely on the demand currently received for 2027, the supply-to-demand gap for 2027 is set to widen even further than ⁠in 2026.”

Long-term memory loss

Memory prices began increasing significantly last year as a boom in data centers supporting AI companies gobbled up vast supplies of memory used to power the hardware that processes all their data. That, in turn, led to global shortages and price spikes that are still being felt and that — according to Samsung — won’t ease up anytime soon.

Samsung is trying to keep up with demand from companies, including Nvidia, even as it competes with those same companies, which are also producing their own semiconductors. Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet are among the world’s top memory-makers, but they’re also customers of Samsung and can’t produce the amount of memory required for their growing needs themselves.