Samsung crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold on Wednesday — only the second Asian company to do so after TSMC. Shares surged over 15 percent. The reason is as simple as it is massive: AI is eating memory chips, and Samsung makes them.
Why now?
Samsung’s first-quarter profit jumped more than eightfold. In February, the company became the world’s first to begin mass production of HBM4 chips — the latest standard for AI memory that data centers need for both training and inference.
The world’s three largest memory chip makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — can barely keep up with demand. All three have pulled investment from their consumer chip businesses and redirected it toward HBM production, where margins are substantially higher.
What this means for AI
The trillion-dollar valuation is more than a stock market headline. It shows how deeply the AI boom has reached into the hardware supply chain. It’s not just model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that are growing — it’s the suppliers building the physical infrastructure.
TSMC, Samsung, Nvidia — the triangle supporting the entire AI infrastructure is being valued at a pace reminiscent of the dot-com era. With one key difference: these companies are actually profitable.
Not all smooth sailing
Samsung workers are threatening an 18-day strike later this month, demanding a bigger share of the AI-driven profits. It’s a pattern we’re seeing across the tech industry: profits are exploding, but distribution remains a point of contention.
Sources: TechCrunch: AI boom pushes Samsung to $1T, CNBC: Samsung crosses $1 trillion valuation