Benefiting from the global AI server construction boom, the supply and demand structure of storage chips has completely reversed. Samsung Electronics announced its preliminary quarterly financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025, with an operating profit of 20 trillion South Korean won (approximately 14.6 billion US dollars), a year-on-year increase of 208%, far exceeding the market's expected 18 trillion South Korean won, setting a new record for the company's highest operating profit in a single quarter. At the same time, sales reached 93 trillion South Korean won, up 23% year-on-year, continuing the second consecutive quarter to break through the 80 trillion South Korean won threshold.

AI servers become the biggest engine, DRAM prices surge

The core driving force behind the sharp increase in profits is the explosive demand for high-performance storage chips in AI data centers:

- HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) is in short supply and has become a standard component for AI chips from NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, and others;

- DDR5 DRAM penetration rate in AI servers is rapidly increasing, with usage per machine being 3-5 times that of traditional servers;

- Samsung and SK Hynix have already proposed to customers a 60%-70% increase in DRAM prices for the first quarter of 2026, marking the highest increase in many years.

Institutions predict that DDR5 prices will rise by 40%环比 in the first quarter of 2026, and another 20% in the second quarter, marking the official start of a "price and volume both rising" super cycle for storage chips.

From "winter" to "summer": the storage industry rebounds strongly

Between 2023 and 2024, the storage industry experienced a two-year downturn, and Samsung had significantly cut capital expenditures. However, since the second half of 2025, the large-scale deployment of AI training clusters has completely reversed the supply-demand relationship:

- The NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system requires 1.5TB HBM3E per machine;

- Cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta have AI capital expenditures exceeding 10 billion US dollars in 2025;

- The China "East Data West Computing" initiative and the release of domestic AI chips further amplify demand.

Samsung, with its leading HBM3E technology and large-scale production capacity, has become the biggest beneficiary of this cycle.

Future Outlook: AI demand continues, and the performance of storage companies is expected to exceed expectations again

Samsung did not disclose details of each business department in its preliminary financial report, but the market generally believes that the semiconductor division (DS) contributed most of the profits. As large models such as GPT-5, Gemini 3, and Claude 4 enter commercial deployment in 2026, AI server shipments are expected to increase by more than 80% year-on-year, and demand for HBM and DDR5 will continue to be tight.

Analysts point out that if the price increases continue to materialize, Samsung's semiconductor profits for the whole year of 2026 could exceed 100 trillion South Korean won, regaining its position as the global semiconductor leader.

AIbase Observation: Storage chips have become the "shovel sellers" of AI infrastructure

While the industry focuses on large models and AI chips, storage chips have become the most certain "shovel sellers" in the AI wave.

Samsung's performance boom proves: without massive, fast, and low-latency storage, even the most powerful AI chips are just "empty pots."