South Korea’s Samsung has surpassed a market capitalisation of $1 trillion.
On May 6, the company’s shares rose 15%, lifting its market value to $1.05 trillion. Samsung became the second Asian company to cross that threshold. The first was Taiwan’s TSMC—the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer.
Over the past year, Samsung’s stock has more than doubled, driven by soaring demand for chips used in artificial intelligence systems. As the WSJ notes, there are no signs of that demand cooling, and Samsung is expected to keep profiting from supply shortages and high prices for AI memory.
Profits have been driven by sales of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), although on that market the South Korean company still trails the leader—SK Hynix, whose share stands at 55% against Samsung’s 25%. A further boost to the stock came from reports that Apple held preliminary talks with Samsung and Intel on producing processors for its devices in the United States—as an alternative to TSMC.
Since the autumn of 2025, consumers around the world have faced a sharp rise in the price of computer memory modules. The reason is the AI race, which has drawn in nearly all the major technology giants. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other players have required enormous computing power for the training and operation of generative artificial intelligence. The current shortage now spans virtually every type of computer memory—from RAM and flash memory, used in smartphones as well, to high-bandwidth HBM in demand at data centres.