Samsung Q2 2026 operating profit hits ₩89.4T, 1,800% YoY surge on AI HBM demand

Samsung posted a second-quarter operating profit of 89.4 trillion won ($58.4 billion) in preliminary earnings, roughly 19 times what the company earned in the same three months of last year. Second-quarter revenue came in at 171 trillion won, more than twice the 74.6 trillion won the company posted a year prior. The surge was driven almost entirely by record demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI data center accelerators.

Samsung's semiconductor division posted an all-time record profit of ₩89.2 trillion while the Galaxy mobile division booked its first-ever operating loss of ₩0.7 trillion. The semiconductor division became the most profitable quarter in the company's history while its Galaxy mobile business was squeezed by the same memory market dynamics making its chip division rich—commodity DRAM prices remained elevated through the first half of 2026 because supply is tight, while for the Galaxy division, those inputs are priced at rates elevated by Samsung's own capacity decisions. Samsung is currently negotiating with commodity DRAM customers with an express goal of hiking prices by up to 20 percent quarter-on-quarter in Q3.

This marks a structural bifurcation of Samsung's profit model: HBM and memory are becoming a commodity play with leverage, while consumer electronics face margin pressure. Operators should watch Q3 guidance on memory pricing sustainability and any signals on foundry demand recovery, as Samsung's DS division targets 70% of nearline exabytes on HAMR-based Mozaic platforms by mid-2027.