Samsung Posts Record Profits While Warning the Memory Shortage Will Only Get Worse
The chipmaker's earnings tripled year over year even as it tells customers to expect tighter supply through at least 2028.
Samsung Electronics just posted one of the best quarters in its history, and in the same breath told the industry to brace for years more of memory scarcity. The two facts are not a coincidence. They're the same story.
The company reported revenue of 171.5 trillion Won, roughly $119 billion, for the second quarter of 2026. A year earlier, that number was 74.6 trillion Won, just under $52 billion. Operating profit told an even sharper story: 89.5 trillion Won, about $62 billion, compared to 25.5 trillion Won, or $17.7 billion, in the same quarter last year. That's profit more than tripling in twelve months.
The money is coming largely from memory chips feeding the AI boom, the same chips that data centers can't get enough of. And according to Samsung's own investor relations chief, the squeeze isn't easing anytime soon. On the company's earnings call, Daniel Oh said supply constraints are set to get worse in 2027 than they are this year, and that Samsung expects the shortage to persist through 2028. Beyond that, he added, visibility is too limited to say much with confidence.
Customers are locking in years of supply just to be safe
One of the clearer signs of how tight things have gotten: customers are now asking Samsung for multi-year supply agreements just to guarantee they get chips at all. Oh confirmed this is happening, and it fits with Samsung's own read on the market. The company doesn't expect any meaningful jump in incremental supply through 2028, so long-term contracts are becoming the only way for buyers to secure capacity rather than compete for it quarter to quarter.
For Samsung, those agreements aren't just a courtesy to nervous customers. They're now covering somewhere between 60% and 70% of the company's total production capacity, according to the earnings call. That's a huge chunk of output essentially pre-sold years in advance, which gives Samsung revenue certainty while leaving less room in the market for anyone who didn't get in early on a contract.
Making matters worse, Samsung expects demand that goes unmet in 2026 to simply roll over into 2027, stacking on top of whatever new demand shows up that year. The shortage doesn't reset each quarter. It compounds.
SK hynix's numbers show the crunch is uneven
Samsung isn't the only memory maker cashing in. SK hynix, one of the other members of the industry's big three alongside Samsung and Micron, also just reported earnings, and the numbers were big: $55.6 billion for the quarter. But that came in below the $58 billion analysts had expected by the end of June, and the shortfall is being pinned on slower shipments of HBM4, a next-generation high-bandwidth memory standard used heavily in AI accelerators.
That miss is a reminder that even in a supply-constrained market flush with demand, execution matters. A shortfall against expectations, even amid record revenue, was enough to leave investors unimpressed.
Who actually benefits from a shortage
There's an uncomfortable dynamic sitting underneath all of this. The memory shortage is squeezing PC builders, laptop buyers, and anyone shopping for hardware with RAM or storage in it, since scarcity pushes prices up across the board. But the two groups driving that scarcity, the memory manufacturers and the AI companies buying up their output, are also the two groups profiting most from it. Both bear some responsibility for creating the crunch in the first place, and both are now reporting some of their best financial results ever because of it.
Samsung and SK hynix are publicly sounding the alarm about supply problems while their earnings reports tell a very different story about who's actually hurting. It's a strange position to warn customers about years of pain to come while banking record profit from that same pain quarter after quarter.
What happens next depends largely on whether AI demand keeps accelerating at its current pace, or whether it plateaus enough for manufacturers to catch up. Samsung's own language suggests it isn't betting on relief soon: 2027 is expected to be tighter than 2026, and 2028 doesn't look much better. Beyond that, even Samsung says it can't see far enough ahead to guess.
