The outlook underscores how memory chip prices have climbed sharply as manufacturers race to meet demand from servers, personal computers and mobile devices used for AI workloads.
The world’s largest memory chipmaker estimated operating profit of 20 trillion won ($13.82 billion) for the October–December period, up from 6.49 trillion won a year earlier and above an LSEG SmartEstimate of 18 trillion won, according to a regulatory filing.
The forecast marks a new quarterly record, surpassing Samsung’s previous high of 17.6 trillion won in the third quarter of 2018.
Samsung shares closed down 1.6%, after rising as much as 2.5% to a record high earlier in the session, with investors locking in gains following a 155% rise over the past year.
Terrific chip demand
Major makers of conventional memory chips, including South Korea’s SK Hynix and Micron Technology, are struggling to keep up with demand and are expanding fabrication capacity.
“The world is going to need more fabs and the reason for that is because of this new industry called AI factories,” said Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, the dominant maker of AI processors.
“It’s good to be a semiconductor manufacturer,” he told reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, adding that “the demand out there is really, really quite terrific.”
The global DRAM market is expected to more than double to $311 billion in 2026 from last year, nearly six times its size in 2023, Macquarie Equity Research said in a note on Tuesday.
DRAM chips are used in servers, computers and smartphones to temporarily store data and enable programs and applications to run smoothly.
Contract prices for one type of DRAM chip rose 313% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, according to market tracker TrendForce.
TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise a further 55% to 60% in the current quarter from the previous one.
Rising memory costs
Samsung, which is also the world’s largest maker of smartphones and televisions, expects revenue to rise 23% to a record 93 trillion won from a year earlier.
Its semiconductor division is expected to generate about 17 trillion won in operating profit in the fourth quarter, accounting for the bulk of earnings, said Ryu Young-ho, a senior analyst at NH Investment & Securities.
He said strong memory prices this year would more than offset sluggish growth in Samsung’s mobile business, which he said would struggle to raise prices sharply to counter rising memory component costs.
Meanwhile, analysts remain broadly positive on Samsung’s earnings outlook, expecting memory undersupply to persist into 2026 as global data centre investment expands and capacity remains constrained.
However, some have warned that higher memory prices could weaken demand and squeeze margins for data centres, PCs and smartphones.
DB Securities analyst Seo Seung-yeon said fourth-quarter profit at Samsung’s mobile business is likely to fall from a year earlier due to higher component costs, while profit is expected to rise in its display business on strong sales of Apple’s iPhone 17 series.
Samsung co-CEO TM Roh, who oversees the company’s mobile, TV and home appliance businesses, told Reuters that some impact from rising memory prices was “inevitable” and did not rule out price increases.
Advanced memory chips
Separately, analysts said Samsung’s high-bandwidth memory business is set for significant growth in 2026 from a low base in 2025, supported by rising demand from customers adopting custom chips such as tensor processing units and expectations of a higher market share at Nvidia.
Samsung co-CEO Jun Young-hyun said last week that customers have praised the competitiveness of the company’s next-generation HBM chips, known as HBM4, quoting them as saying “Samsung is back.”
Samsung is scheduled to release detailed results, including a breakdown of earnings by business division, on Jan. 29.