On a Tuesday morning in Seoul, Samsung Electronics shares fell more than 8% — not because the company had done badly, but because some investors had expected it to do even better. That paradox captures the extraordinary moment the global semiconductor industry finds itself in. Samsung forecast operating profits of 89.4 trillion won ($58.

4bn) for the second quarter of 2024, a figure roughly 19 times higher than the same period a year earlier and the third consecutive quarterly record in the company's history. The driving force behind those numbers is artificial intelligence. Every large-scale AI system requires vast banks of high-bandwidth memory chips to function, and Samsung is one of the world's principal suppliers of precisely that product. Demand has so comprehensively outpaced supply that the company has been able to raise prices across its memory portfolio without losing customers.

Research firm IDC described the current appetite for semiconductors destined for data centres as "different from anything the memory industry has navigated," and its analyst Bryan Ma warned that supplies are expected to remain tight through 2025 given what he called "unabated demand from AI data centres." The scale of the shift is visible not just in Samsung's earnings but across South Korea's financial markets. Rival chipmaker SK Hynix has seen its share price climb more than 200% since January, while the country's benchmark Kospi index has risen more than 80% over the same period — an almost unheard-of gain for a major national market index. Industry analyst Marc Einstein of Counterpoint Research noted that Samsung's performance was "close to the tech sector record set by Nvidia earlier this year," framing it as one of the best quarterly results ever recorded in the sector.