(Bloomberg) — Samsung Electronics Co. earned a far stronger-than-expected eight-fold leap in quarterly profit, underscoring robust demand for AI memory chips in the face of markets roiled by war in the Middle East.
Customers led by cloud service providers are ramping up orders for high-bandwidth memory and other chips used in data centers to feed artificial intelligence services, lifting both volumes and margins at the chips-to-smartphones conglomerate.
Shares of Samsung, which have slumped from their February peak, rose as much as 4.9% during early morning trading in Seoul on Tuesday, shaking off some of the fears that the US-Iran conflict is hurting the durability of spending on energy-guzzling AI hardware. Shares of rival SK Hynix Inc. gained 5.3%.
Samsung reported preliminary operating profit of 57.2 trillion won ($37.9 billion) in the March quarter — up 755% to…
