{"id":9152,"date":"2026-05-08T14:04:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T14:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/9152\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T14:04:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T14:04:47","slug":"samsung-sk-hynix-flag-record-supply-squeeze-in-memory-market-as-ai-demand-soars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/9152\/","title":{"rendered":"Samsung, SK Hynix flag record supply squeeze in memory market as AI demand soars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, South Korea\u2019s two memory chip giants<\/a>, are warning of a prolonged and severe global supply crunch, weeks after the two companies disclosed increased investments in their China wafer fabs<\/a> to meet surging artificial intelligence demand.<\/p>\n

During Samsung\u2019s first-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the company said its order fulfilment rate had plunged to a \u201crecord low\u201d. In a rare move, customers worried about shortages were already pre-booking memory capacity for 2027, according to company executives.<\/p>\n

Available supply was far short of customer demand, executives said, adding that production-ready capacity for the next-generation high bandwidth memory \u2013 the HBM4 \u2013 was fully booked.<\/p>\n

The two South Korean chipmakers remain the largest beneficiaries of the memory supercycle. Explosive AI demand, especially from the rapid adoption of AI agents<\/a>, has pushed Samsung\u2019s earnings to record levels. Quarterly revenue jumped 69 per cent year on year to 133.9 trillion won (US$90.25 billion), while operating profit surged nearly eightfold to 57.2 trillion won.Samsung\u2019s warning of supply-demand imbalance echoes similar concerns from rival SK Hynix, which released its own record-breaking first-quarter results last week. Revenue soared nearly 200 per cent year on year to 52.6 trillion won, driven by structural demand for advanced memory chips<\/a>.\"SKSK Hynix\u2019s first-quarter revenue soared nearly 200 per cent year on year. Photo: AP<\/p>\n

Demand from major customers was increasing across the board \u2013 including HBM, dynamic random access memory and enterprise solid-state drives \u2013 while suppliers struggled to increase output, said Kim Woo-hyun, chief financial officer of SK Hynix, at the earnings call. He added that the current rising price cycle was expected to last longer than past industry cycles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, South Korea\u2019s two memory chip giants, are warning of a prolonged and severe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9153,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[134,7016,3166,699,4287,7015,127,7021,241,275,33,7017,7020,7019,7018],"class_list":["post-9152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sk-hynix","tag-china","tag-dalian","tag-goldman-sachs","tag-hbm","tag-hbm4","tag-kim-woo-hyun","tag-samsung","tag-seagate-technology","tag-sk","tag-sk-hynix","tag-south-korea","tag-wuxi","tag-xian","tag-yicai","tag-zhu-yiming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}