Samsung just posted its best quarter ever and used the moment to warn that memory chips are about to get scarcer.
Samsung's Q2 2026 earnings showed revenue of 171.5 trillion Won (about $119 billion), more than double the 74.6 trillion Won it made a year earlier. Operating profit hit 89.5 trillion Won ($62 billion), up from 25.5 trillion Won ($17.7 billion). On the earnings call, investor relations head Daniel Oh said supply constraints will get worse in 2027 than in 2026, with the shortage likely running through 2028 and visibility fading beyond 2029. Samsung says demand it can't meet this year will simply roll into next year, and customers are now asking for multi-year supply contracts to lock in capacity - deals that already cover 60-70% of Samsung's total production.
Samsung isn't warning about a crisis it's suffering through - it's warning about one it's profiting from, while signing customers to years-long contracts at the same time. Rival SK hynix's numbers tell a similar story: $55.6 billion in revenue, technically a miss against the $58 billion analysts expected, blamed on slower HBM4 shipments, but still a record haul. AI data centers are consuming memory faster than fabs can produce it, and the two biggest suppliers are the ones writing the terms.
A shortage that hands pricing power to the exact companies announcing it isn't really a warning - it's a forecast for their next earnings call.