The company said on Tuesday it is projecting an operating profit of 57.2 trillion won ($38.2 billion) for the January to March period.

This is far ahead of expectations and more than eight times higher than the 6.69 trillion won it reported a year earlier. It also exceeds the company’s total profit for all of last year.

This would be Samsung’s strongest quarterly result on record. Its previous high stood at 20 trillion won, reached in the final quarter of 2025.

Demand from data centres has pushed prices higher. Companies building AI systems buy large volumes of memory chips, stretching supply. As a result, prices for DRAM chips rose sharply in the first quarter, with estimates pointing to increases of more than 50%.

“As customers anticipated further increases, actual contract prices came in higher, leading to the beat,” Kim Sunwoo, a senior analyst at Meritz Securities, said.

Samsung appears to be benefiting across most of its business. Analysts estimate its memory division generated about 54 trillion won in operating profit during the quarter.

Its mobile unit also held up, reporting around 4 trillion won in profit, though slightly lower than a year ago. However, its logic chip business is still under pressure and is expected to post a loss.

Currency movements have also helped. The South Korean won has fallen to a near 17-year low against the U.S. dollar, lifting the value of overseas earnings when converted back.

Even so, there are signs that the pace of growth may slow. The high cost of energy linked to the conflict in the Middle East has added pressure on production. At the same time, there are concerns that customers may begin to push back against high chip prices.

“There are growing concerns about a peak-out in memory price increases. It does appear that we are now past the initial upcycle phase and into a later stage,” said Ryu Young-ho, a senior analyst at NH Investment & Securities.

Recent data support that view. Spot prices for DRAM chips eased last week, noting that buyers are struggling to keep up with current price levels.

New technology could also affect demand. Google recently introduced a memory-saving system known as TurboQuant, which may reduce the amount of memory needed for AI workloads.

Samsung has also been working to strengthen its position in high-bandwidth memory chips, which are used in advanced AI processors.

The company began shipping its latest HBM4 chips to Nvidia in February, narrowing the gap with its main opponent, SK Hynix. Still, these advanced chips account for less than 10% of its DRAM revenue, meaning most of the profit is still coming from standard memory products.

In the market, Samsung’s shares rose 1.8% following the earnings outlook, outperforming the index. Shares in SK Hynix also increased.

Despite recent challenges, Samsung’s stock is still significantly higher this year, building on strong gains recorded in 2025.

The company is expected to release full details of its first-quarter results on April 30.

The company said net income for the year reached $1.06 billion, up from $845.7 million in 2024. Earnings per share also climbed, with GAAP EPS rising 29% to $9.62.

In the fourth quarter alone, revenue came in at $745 million, a 6% increase year on year. Subscription revenue stood out, rising 11% to $325 million.

Check Point: Eight Key Trends Will Define Africa’s Cyber Security in 2026

Growth is not coming from one-off sales, it is being driven by recurring security subscriptions, which now account for a large share of total income.

The company also reported calculated billings of $2.9 billion for the full year, up 9%. Remaining performance obligations, which show future contracted revenue, reached $2.73 billion.

Chief Executive Officer Nadav Zafrir said: “We delivered solid fourth quarter and full year 2025 results, with revenue landing above the midpoint of our outlook and EPS exceeding expectations. Our performance remained resilient throughout the year, driven by continued customer adoption across our Hybrid Mesh Network and Workspace platforms.”

He added: “In 2026, our strategy is centred on securing our customers’ AI transformation across the enterprise. We are focused on executing against our four strategic pillars, Hybrid Mesh, Workspace, and Exposure Management, while embedding AI-driven security throughout our portfolio.

“Today’s announced acquisition of Cyata further expands our AI security stack, enabling full discovery, governance, and control of AI agents as organisations accelerate their AI journeys.”

Beyond earnings, the company moved to strengthen its product offering. It announced three acquisitions in early 2026, covering AI security, asset monitoring, and managed service platforms.

Cash reserves more than doubled during the year. Cash, marketable securities and short-term deposits rose to $4.34 billion from $2.78 billion. The increase followed proceeds from a $2 billion convertible notes offering.

At the same time, Check Point returned money to shareholders. It repurchased about 6.8 million shares in 2025 at a total cost of $1.4 billion.

Cash flow from operations also improved, reaching $1.23 billion for the year despite a one-off tax payment linked to prior years.

Check Point is growing steadily, with stronger revenue in 2025, thriving subscriptions, and a larger cash position in 2026.

The tech giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reported revenue of $51.24 billion for the third quarter of 2025, a 26% increase from a year earlier and above Wall Street’s expectations. 

But costs rose faster, climbing 32%, and a $15.93 billion charge linked to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” slashed net income to $2.71 billion. Without that charge, Meta’s adjusted earnings would have been $18.64 billion.

Despite the strong revenue growth, Meta’s shares dropped 8% in after-hours trading as investors reacted to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to scale up spending on AI infrastructure, a move that could pressure profit margins in the near term.

Zuckerberg told analysts that Meta intends to “aggressively front-load building capacity,” arguing that it’s the right strategy to be ready for faster-than-expected breakthroughs in AI.

“There’s a range of timelines for when people think that we’re going to get superintelligence,” he said. “I think that it’s the right strategy to aggressively front-load building capacity, so that way we’re prepared for the most optimistic cases.”

The company has launched an initiative called Meta Superintelligence Labs, formed in June, to drive its AI goals. Zuckerberg said the unit already has “the highest talent density in the industry,” and Meta is among the top buyers of Nvidia’s sought-after AI chips. “We’re also building what we expect to be an industry-leading amount of compute,” he added.

Meta company now expects to spend between $70 billion and $72 billion this year, up from an earlier estimate of $66 billion to $72 billion, and says next year’s capital expenditure will be “notably larger.” 

Much of this increase will go toward expanding data centre capacity and hiring AI specialists, according to CFO Susan Li, who confirmed employee compensation will be a key cost driver in 2026.

Meta’s aggressive approach comes as Big Tech firms like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and OpenAI are all scaling up their compute capabilities to support advanced AI models. 

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said earlier this week that he hopes the company will one day be able to “add 1 gigawatt of compute every week,” and that could cost upwards of $40 billion per gigawatt.

This ballooning investment across the tech sector has led to talks of a possible “AI bubble,” with analysts warning that spending may outpace returns. “Meta’s earnings reveal the growing tension between the company’s massive AI infrastructure investments and investor expectations for near-term returns,” said Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com.

Still, Meta’s core business stays strong. Its AI-driven advertising systems are performing well, with tools that automate campaigns, create persona-based images, and enhance video ad quality for over 3.5 billion daily users across its platforms. 

The company’s expanding ad offerings on WhatsApp and Threads, and sustained growth in Instagram Reels, have strengthened its competitiveness with the likes of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Elon Musk’s X.

“While everyone else is still pitching AI moonshots, Meta has quietly turned AI into margin,” said Jeremy Goldman, senior director at Emarketer. “Its ad tools are sharper, its targeting smarter, and its short-form video business is finally paying off.”

For the fourth quarter, Meta expects revenue between $56 billion and $59 billion, slightly above analysts’ projections.

For the second quarter, the chipmaker reported $46.7 billion in revenue, representing a 56% jump from the same period last year. Net income also surged to $26.4 billion, up 59% year-on-year. 

The results, which is more than the initial projection, reveal just how much the company has become the backbone of the artificial intelligence growth.

Data centre sales, the largest driver of growth, pulled in $41.1 billion, with the new Blackwell generation of chips accounting for $27 billion alone. “Blackwell is the AI platform the world has been waiting for,” CEO Jensen Huang said. “The AI race is on, and Blackwell is the platform at its centre.”

Huang spoke on his long-term outlook, projecting a $3 to $4 trillion wave of AI infrastructure spending by 2030. “$3 to 4 trillion is fairly sensible for the next five years,” he told analysts on the call.

Beyond the financials, Nvidia underlined its central role in OpenAI’s release of open-source gpt-oss models earlier this month, noting that its Blackwell GB200 NVL72 rack system processed 1.5 million tokens per second during the launch.

However, not all markets are open doors, as the company admitted that it sold zero units of its China-focused H20 chip in the past quarter. Instead, $650 million worth of those devices went to a buyer outside China. 

The lack of shipments comes from a murky U.S. policy under President Trump, which currently allows Nvidia to sell advanced GPUs to China if it pays a 15% export tax. Legal scholars have criticised the arrangement as an “unconstitutional abuse of power.”

Nvidia’s Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, stressed the company’s hesitation: “While a select number of our China-based customers have received licences over the past few weeks, we have not shipped any H20 devices based on those licences.”

Adding to the issue, Beijing has discouraged local firms from using Nvidia’s chips, a move that reportedly pushed the company to halt production of the H20 earlier this month.

In future plans, Nvidia has guided for $54 billion in revenue in the third quarter, though it warned that figure does not include any Chinese shipments. The guidance was broadly in line with Wall Street expectations, but fell short of more bullish analyst forecasts of over $60 billion.

Despite the blockbuster earnings and the announcement of a $60 billion stock buyback, Nvidia’s shares slid about 3% in post-market trading.

The dip reflected disappointment over a narrow miss in data centre revenue, a segment that investors have been watching closely as a proxy for the strength of the AI boom.

Analysts expect the South Korean tech giant to post an operating profit of 6.3 trillion won ($4.62 billion) for the April-June period, a steep 39% drop in Samsung Q2 profit, compared to the same quarter last year.

The second-quarter performance, if confirmed, would be Samsung’s lowest profit in a year and a half. It also worsens concerns about the company’s capacity to compete in the accelerating AI hardware space, where rivals like SK Hynix and Micron are gaining ground.

While Samsung has pushed aggressively to position its HBM3E chips at the heart of next-generation AI systems, execution has stumbled. 

Its 12-layer HBM3E stacks reportedly passed Nvidia’s bare-die tests but are still awaiting full-package certification. Meanwhile, both SK Hynix and Micron have already begun large-scale shipments of certified HBM3E chips to Nvidia, securing a head start in the booming AI memory market.

“HBM revenue likely remained flat in the second quarter, as China sales restrictions persist and Samsung has yet to begin supplying its HBM3E 12-high chips to Nvidia,” said Ryu Young-ho, senior analyst at NH Investment & Securities. He added that significant shipments to Nvidia this year are unlikely.

Samsung’s situation is further complicated by its exposure to China, which accounts for roughly 20% of its HBM sales. U.S. export restrictions on advanced chips have disrupted those flows, and more hurdles could be on the way. 

Washington is reportedly weighing the revocation of technology authorisations that allow companies like Samsung to receive American chipmaking tools at their Chinese plants.

That risk of regulatory tightening is making investors doubtful, particularly with the added threat of proposed U.S. tariffs, up to 25% on non-U.S.-made smartphones. 

Analysts warn the current surge in Samsung smartphone sales, driven by pre-tariff stockpiling in the U.S., may not last. If tariffs are enforced in the second half of 2025, demand for premium models like the Galaxy S25 and Z Fold 7 could slow sharply.

In the face of these challenges, Samsung has begun supplying its 36GB 12-layer HBM3E stacks to AMD. The U.S. chipmaker confirmed in June that its MI350 AI accelerators will integrate Samsung’s memory chips, an encouraging sign, but not enough to offset Nvidia-related delays.

Investors have taken notice. Despite a 19% rise in Samsung shares this year, the company is still the worst-performing major memory chip stock of 2025. The KOSPI index has climbed 27.3% over the same period, leaving Samsung trailing behind.

As of Monday morning in Seoul, Samsung Electronics shares were down nearly 2%, underperforming the market yet again.

As we await the official release of Samsung Q2 profit, the company has not commented on whether its chips have passed Nvidia’s certification process. The company’s silence, combined with ongoing delays and regulatory risks, has increased doubts about its competitiveness in a market where being first, and fast, matters more than ever.