250x Surge: Samsung Says Memory Shortage to Deepen by 2028

Samsung's chip arm just posted results that read like a plot twist: profits soared, but trouble is brewing in the memory market.

The semiconductor division recorded an operating profit of 89.2 trillion won (about $61.7 billion) in Q2 2026 — roughly 250 times the level from a year earlier. The whole company pulled in 171.5 trillion won ($118.5 billion) in revenue, and total operating profit reached 89.5 trillion won (about $62.0 billion) — a haul that eclipses much of Samsung’s recent multi-year performance.

Still, the celebration came with a warning. Jae-joon Kim, Samsung’s senior vice president in the memory unit, told analysts that the global shortage of memory chips is likely to worsen in 2027 and persist into 2028. Why? Long-term demand from data centers and AI workloads is gobbling up supply faster than new fabs can come online.

Samsung says it has signed five long-term (at least five-year) supply contracts with major global datacenter operators and is close to finalizing deals with five more. Those agreements will lock up 60–70% of the company’s long-term memory capacity and include safeguards — prepayments and minimum price clauses — designed to reduce investment risk for Samsung.

On the product front, Samsung expects revenue from high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) to more than triple in Q3, a sign that AI training and large-scale compute are already shifting where demand is concentrated. The foundry business, which faces off against TSMC and Intel, is also slated to move toward profitability as factory utilization rises.

Capacity expansion is concrete: production at Samsung’s Texas facility is due to ramp this year, and a second Texas plant is slated for mass production in 2030. Still, fabs take years and billions to build. Contracts, prepayments and price floors are Samsung’s way of buying time and certainty while demand surges.

Not every division benefited. Higher memory prices have strained other units; the mobile business reported a loss of 700 billion won for the quarter — a first for Samsung. CFO Park Seon-chul noted that steady, cash-generating operations across the company mean Samsung doesn’t currently need fresh capital from a U.S. stock offering.

The market reacted with a brief rush of optimism: Samsung shares climbed as much as 8% after the results, then settled down to a 1.1% decline by the end of the trading session. Investors are weighing one paradox — record chip profits alongside a looming supply squeeze that could reshape where manufacturers, cloud providers and chip buyers place their next bets.

Who will build the extra capacity fast enough to calm a market that AI is heating up faster than fabs can be built?