Samsung Electronics is expected to report a preliminary second-quarter operating profit of 84.3 trillion won on Tuesday, an 18-fold jump from a year earlier that would put its profit above what it made for all of 2025. Revenue is forecast to rise 127% to a record 169 trillion won, underscoring how sharply the memory chip business has swung back as AI demand keeps high-performance chips in short supply.
Investors in Samsung Electronics and other semiconductor stocks are watching the numbers for a simple reason: they want to know whether the AI memory boom is still strong enough to keep prices and margins rising. Samsung is the world's largest memory chipmaker, and the result is being treated as a read on the broader global AI trade at a moment when the stock rally in chipmakers has started to wobble.
The price data already point to a powerful quarter. HSBC said average DRAM selling prices rose more than 40% in the April-June quarter from the previous quarter, while NAND prices jumped more than 50%. Those gains help explain why analysts tracked by see such a steep profit surge, even after a run-up that pushed Samsung stock to double last quarter and climb more than 160% this year.
That strength is colliding with a nervous market. Samsung recently fell nearly 9% over five sessions, and volatility across major semiconductor stocks hit its highest level since 2020. The pullback shows how quickly investors are questioning whether the AI-driven rally has gone too far, even as demand for the chips that train and run large AI systems still appears to be doing the heavy lifting.
There is also a longer investment story behind the numbers. Samsung Group and SK Group are planning two chipmaking plants each in southwest South Korea, part of a combined 800 trillion won investment that signals how aggressively the industry is betting on memory demand. Tuesday's preliminary results will tell Wall Street whether that bet is still being rewarded in real time, or whether the latest surge in prices has already started to cool.
