AI has been a big boon for the electronics giant Samsung this year — something the company expects to continue throughout 2024. In a new earnings release, the South Korean company’s chip division saw its operating profit more than triple to 1.9 trillion won ($1.4 billion) during the first quarter from last year.
“As AI providers increase, the size of training data becomes proportionally bigger, leading to higher performance and data storage needs. So, we’re seeing a lot of incoming requests from the customers [for products],” Jaejune Kim, the director of Samsung’s semiconductor division, told investors in a call Tuesday morning.
In fact, AI was mentioned 58 times during the call. Kim told analysts that AI is mainly driving demand for its memory chips, or computer chips used to store data. But it’s also boosting sales of its ultra-high density hard drives, or hardware that’s also used for data storage, Kim added. Samsung’s overall net profit rose nearly five-fold to 6.6 trillion won ($4.8 billion), and shares rose 1% in Seoul trading following its report.
The company expects its good fortunes to continue, thanks to AI. “The continuous increasing supply of AI servers and subsequent expansion of our associated cloud services should increase the demand for not only [our high-bandwidth memory chips], which is directly linked with AI, but also conventional servers and storage in parallel,” said Kim.
Samsung is beating Apple $AAPL in the race to bring AI to smartphones