Wall Street moved higher on Monday as technology and semiconductor stocks led the charge, with investors positioning themselves ahead of what could be a landmark earnings report from Samsung Electronics.
Samsung is expected to report its Q2 2026 earnings around July 7-8, with analysts projecting an operating profit of approximately 86 trillion won, roughly $56 billion.
Samsung’s semiconductor division is doing the heavy lifting
To understand how we got here, look at Q1 2026. Samsung reported an operating profit of 57.2 trillion won for the first quarter, an increase of more than eightfold compared to the same period a year earlier. Of that total, 53.7 trillion won, or about 94%, came directly from the semiconductor division.
The driver is AI. Demand for high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips that power large language models and AI inference workloads, has created a supply crunch that benefits the handful of companies capable of producing them at scale. Samsung is one of those companies. SK Hynix and Micron are two others, and both have seen robust stock rallies of their own in recent months for exactly the same reason.
