Samsung Electronics has shipped samples of its latest high-bandwidth memory chips to customers around the world, sending its shares up roughly 6%. The move represents the company’s most aggressive push yet into the AI hardware supply chain, where demand for specialized memory continues to outstrip supply.
The shipment involves Samsung’s sixth-generation HBM4 chips, purpose-built for the kind of massive parallel processing that AI data centers devour. HBM chips stack layers of memory on top of each other, letting AI models access enormous amounts of data simultaneously.
The numbers behind the comeback
In Q1 2026, the company posted a record operating profit of 57.2 trillion won, an increase of more than eightfold compared to the same period a year earlier. The primary engine behind that growth: AI memory demand.
That momentum pushed Samsung’s market capitalization past the $1 trillion mark in May 2026. It became only the second Asian company to reach that threshold, trailing only TSMC, the Taiwanese chipmaker that fabricates processors for Apple, Nvidia, and practically everyone else.
