There are two ways for chipmakers to make money from the AI boom. The first is to make the stuff that everyone wants. Taiwan’s mighty TSMC — which produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced chips — does this, and beat its own forecasts in quarterly earnings on Thursday. The other is to make the products that people turn to when they can’t get their first choice. Samsung, which like TSMC just enjoyed a record quarter with Won20tn ($14bn) of earnings, has so far slipped into this category.
The Korean behemoth’s struggles to produce cutting-edge chips have, oddly, helped it. Samsung has had difficulty mastering the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips needed for AI. But in seeking a workaround, customers have partly turned to more commoditised memory products, where it is the world leader.
Prices for Dram chips, one of these less cutting-edge alternatives that is also a key component in data centre servers, rose by up to 40 per cent quarter on quarter in the last three months of 2025 while Nand products jumped as much as 60 per cent, say Nomura analysts who expect a further 30 per cent increase in the first half of this year.