Samsung posts record $58.4 billion quarterly profit, topping Nvidia

Samsung just out-earned Nvidia, and AI is the reason.

On July 7, 2026, Samsung Electronics reported about 89.4 trillion won ($58.4 billion) in operating profit for Q2 2026, up roughly 19x year over year. It is the largest single-quarter operating profit any technology company has ever reported, topping Nvidia’s $53.5 billion record and Apple’s $50.9 billion.

Memory is the engine

The number is not about phones or TVs. The engine is memory. Samsung makes the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that every major AI accelerator needs, and demand has outrun supply for three straight quarters.

The pricing environment shows what a supply squeeze at the center of the AI boom looks like. DRAM prices rose 44% in the quarter. NAND flash rose 53%. Samsung’s revenue more than doubled from a year earlier. When the entire AI industry needs a component that only a few companies can make at scale, the sellers of that component set the terms.

From the face of the boom to the biggest profits

For years Nvidia was the face of the AI boom, and its record quarters were the benchmark for how much money AI could generate. Now the company selling the memory inside the machines is posting the biggest profits in tech history.

That is a meaningful shift in where the value in the AI stack is landing. GPUs get the headlines, but every accelerator ships with stacks of HBM attached, and total memory demand scales with every new data center. Samsung sits on that chokepoint, and this quarter shows what the position is worth.

The next leg of the race

The question the quarter raises is which side of the stack captures the next wave of AI spending: the chips doing the computing, or the memory feeding them. Nvidia’s record stood as the high-water mark of the AI era until a memory maker beat it. As long as HBM demand keeps outrunning supply, the answer may keep tilting toward memory.