SEOUL — Samsung Electronics said Thursday that it earned a preliminary operating profit of 107.4 trillion won in the third quarter, the first time the company has exceeded 100 trillion won in a single quarter, a figure analysts said is now too large to be stored on any device not manufactured by Samsung.
The record result, roughly $80 billion and up about 782 percent from a year earlier, was driven by surging demand for the high-bandwidth memory chips that power artificial intelligence systems. According to analysts at the Center for Measured Outcomes, the profit itself now requires approximately 11 data centers to hold, and is backed up nightly to a second, slightly smaller profit kept off-site in case of emergency.
“We have had to start storing the zeros separately,” said Dr. Marjorie Teller, the Center’s director. “There are 11 of them, if you count in won. They are being kept in a climate-controlled facility in a different city from the 1, the 0, the 7, and the 4, for their own safety.”
The quarter’s results also showed that the company’s consumer electronics business struggled under the rising cost of memory chips, which it buys from, among other suppliers, Samsung. Analysts said the arrangement has placed the company’s phone division in the position of being priced out of its own components by its own success. In the 11 weeks since prices began rising, according to the Center, the phone division has written a formal letter of complaint to the chip division, received a polite reply from the chip division, and been unable to afford the memory required to save the reply.
By Thursday afternoon, the figure had grown large enough to exert a measurable gravitational pull. Accountants in the company’s finance department reported that pencils, staplers, and several smaller quarterly reports had begun drifting toward it, and that a junior analyst who attempted to read the number aloud on Wednesday afternoon was still reading it at press time.
Jae-won Seo, a semiconductor analyst at the Seoul Institute of Applied Arithmetic, said the result reflected an industry that has run out of other places to put its money. “Everyone needs memory now,” Seo said. “The AI models need memory. The data centers need memory. The profit needs memory. It is memory all the way down, and at the bottom of it, someone has to remember what all of it was for.”
Samsung is expected to release a full breakdown of its results by business unit later this month, once the breakdown has finished loading.