Amazon’s AI Highway First, Toll Revenue Surges…Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix Also Beam as They Profit Every Time a Road Is Built [Plus Watchlist]

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Big tech diverges again: Amazon surges, Apple falls

사진 확대 Amazon CEO Andy Jassy aims to become the king of AI by pouring all of its money into AI [Yonhap News] ▶Amazon raises its AI investment to $220 billion ▶Cloud growth offsets negative cash flow ▶Strong memory demand sends the domestic stock market soaring

This is not about politics. The left side was the path of artificial intelligence (AI), while the right side was the side unrelated to AI. The earnings results released early on the 31st for the two big tech companies were both solid, but the market is reacting to Amazon.

Amazon is investing the most in AI, and it plans to keep doing so. With strong AI-related earnings on top of that, semiconductor hardware stocks in the United States and South Korea are cheering. The four major AI investors led by Amazon are Alphabet Inc.(Google), Microsoft, and Meta Platforms. They are set to pour 1,000 trillion won into AI this year. Among them, Amazon has gone a step further and declared that it will increase investment even more.

Amazon EPS triples expectations in a surprise earnings beat

사진 확대 [Designer Kim Hyung-kyu]

The four companies are locked in fierce competition to dominate the AI market. Apple’s investment is so modest that it barely even enters the conversation. In any case, the biggest beneficiaries of the AI race are Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, the No.1 and No. 2 companies by market capitalization on the KOSPI Composite Index. 6 billion in the second quarter of 2026, breaking the $200 billion barrier for the first time in a single quarter.2 billion in revenue, up 37% from the second quarter of 2025. That was the highest growth rate in 18 quarters. Amazon had already poured tens of billions of dollars into building AI data centers, servers, and its own semiconductors starting in 2023.

It was a bold and, for ordinary companies, reckless move. As the AI era began in earnest, demand exploded for companies to rent AI computing power from AWS instead of building their own servers. Training and inference for AI models require enormous computing power.Building that infrastructure directly costs a fortune, but renting it from AWS means paying only for what you use, which reduces short-term costs. That is why Amazon’s cloud business has grown so rapidly.

Put simply, Amazon laid the “AI highway” first and is now collecting tolls from the cars that drive on it — ordinary companies. To collect more tolls, Amazon needs to lay wider roads, or data centers, even faster.

The Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, which exclusively supply the materials for those roads — High Bandwidth Memory and DRAM — are also seeing a sharp jump in earnings. The sharp swings in the domestic stock market, where Samsung Electronics and SK hynix have major influence, are closely tied to capital spending by big tech companies such as Amazon.82. 5 billion.CEO Andy Jassy said, “AWS is growing explosively, and our AI and chip businesses have each reached a stable track with annual revenue of more than $25 billion. ” That confidence drove the company to raise its full-year 2026 capital expenditure forecast from $200 billion to $220 billion.

Shares surged more than 10% in after-hours trading following the earnings release. Amazon’s capex trend dipped slightly only when moving from 2022 to 2023, but it has since surged.

사진 확대 [Designer Kim Hyung-kyu]

5 times higher than in 2022. Most of that investment is flowing into AI chips, robotics, and low Earth orbit satellites.

All of it is expensive infrastructure, but the rapid growth of cloud services appears to be offsetting the burden. 6 billion as of the second quarter of 2026, or about 11 trillion won.Still, investors seem willing to overlook it, betting that even more money will soon come in. The full article is available on Maeil Business Plus, Maeil Business Newspaper’s premium finance and investing content platform.

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This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.