Samsung’s semiannual report filed August 14, 2026 reveals a striking reversal in the geography of the world’s most important memory chip flows: the company shipped approximately $62.5 billion in chips to China in the first half of the year, compared with roughly $49.8 billion to the United States, a gap of about $12.7 billion that puts Beijing ahead of Washington as a destination for Samsung’s semiconductor exports. China shipments surged 207.7% year-on-year, while US exports more than doubled from the same period in 2025. The numbers, drawn directly from the report and covered by techtimes.com, capture how AI-fueled demand is redistributing the chip trade between two rival superpowers whose governments are simultaneously trying to reduce economic dependence on each other.
HBM turned Samsung’s chip division into a 70% margin business
The export surge is a downstream consequence of a technology shift inside Samsung’s products. High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, solved the data bottleneck that would otherwise cap AI model performance at current scale. By stacking multiple DRAM dies vertically and connecting them through thousands of microscopic through-silicon vias, HBM delivers bandwidth across a bus 32 times wider than standard DDR5. Samsung’s sixth-generation HBM4, which entered mass production in February 2026, implements the JEDEC JESD270-4 standard with a 2,048-bit interface and at least 2 terabytes per second of bandwidth per stack. Each Nvidia Vera Rubin GPU carries eight such stacks.
Because HBM cannot be replaced by a cheaper alternative at the frontier AI level, and because Samsung and SK hynix together produce approximately 90% of the world’s HBM supply, Samsung’s Device Solutions (DS) semiconductor division generated operating margins of roughly 70% in the second quarter, a figure that surpasses Nvidia’s own margins in the same period. The DS division accounted for 68.5% of Samsung’s total first-half sales of approximately $215.4 billion and was responsible for 97.4% of total operating profit, around $100.8 billion. DS quarterly operating profit hit records in both Q1 (~$37.9 billion) and Q2 (~$62.9 billion). Samsung’s DRAM market share rose 5.4 percentage points to 39.4% in the first half of the year.
The one part of Samsung that HBM is actively harming is Samsung’s own finished-products business. The same memory price surge that powers DS division margins drove up the cost of mobile memory bought by Samsung’s Device eXperience (DX) division by 211% compared with last year’s annual average, contributing to the first operating loss in the division’s history.
Why China received $12.7 billion more than the US
The gap does not reflect a strategic choice to prioritize Beijing over Washington. It reflects product mix and geography. Samsung’s China exports include not only server-oriented products such as HBM and DRAM for AI data centers, but also the mobile categories that remain the backbone of Chinese consumer electronics: LPDDR DRAM, NAND flash, image sensors, and display driver ICs. The US market, by contrast, receives primarily Samsung’s highest-value AI memory products, routed to Nvidia, AMD, and the major cloud providers that dominate American AI infrastructure spending.
Several forces drove the 207.7% year-on-year growth in China exports. Chinese cloud companies and AI infrastructure builders aggressively acquired server memory, accelerating procurement ahead of potential further tightening in US export controls. Commodity DRAM and NAND prices surged roughly 90-95% in the first quarter of 2026 alone, inflating the dollar value of each unit shipped without a corresponding increase in volume. And Samsung’s Xi’an NAND facility, the company’s largest NAND production site outside South Korea, continued to operate at scale throughout the first half, producing a meaningful share of memory flowing into China. For context, in the first half of 2023, the last period before US export controls on advanced semiconductor equipment significantly tightened, Samsung’s chip exports to China totaled approximately $44.6 billion for the full year.
Xi’an and Wuxi: running on borrowed permission
Samsung’s Xi’an NAND flash facility in China is one of the largest memory production sites in Asia. Its continued operation depends on a one-year US government export license that was granted on December 30, 2025 and expires December 31, 2026. That license replaced Samsung’s prior status as a “validated end user,” a permanent pre-approval that had allowed Samsung’s China fabs to receive US-controlled chipmaking equipment without applying for individual export licenses. Washington revoked VEU status in 2025.
SK hynix operates under identical terms, with its DRAM fab in Wuxi and NAND plant in Dalian running on the same annual license framework. SK hynix’s Dalian facility restarted construction and equipment installation in August 2026, targeting mass production in H1 2027. The practical risk is not an immediate shutdown. Samsung’s Xi’an facility could continue operating existing equipment for some time without new US-origin tool imports. But over months, the inability to import replacement parts, upgrade lithography equipment, or bring in new deposition and etch systems would degrade production yield and capacity. A denial or even a delayed renewal would create a supply gap in NAND flash that would ripple through data center procurement globally.
Record H1 investment and the HBM4E sample shipments
The same semiannual report disclosed that Samsung invested a record approximately $38.8 billion in research and development and capital expenditure in the first half of 2026. R&D spending reached roughly $19.3 billion, the highest first-half R&D total in Samsung’s history, while capital expenditure hit approximately $19.8 billion. On May 29, 2026, Samsung shipped the industry’s first HBM4E samples to major customers, twelfth-generation-stacked chips built on Samsung’s 4-nanometer logic process for the base die, delivering 3.6 terabytes per second of bandwidth per stack. Samsung is targeting HBM4E for Nvidia’s next-generation AI platform after Vera Rubin, and shipping samples more than six months ahead of competitors positions the company for the design-win qualification race that determines memory supply allocations for each new GPU generation.
For now, the report documents a six-month period in which the AI memory supercycle produced numbers the semiconductor industry had not seen before, and in which the tightrope between two superpowers held. Whether the second half of 2026 looks anything like the first depends on a December 31 annual license renewal that no company controls and that the US government has not yet committed to granting. Samsung’s role as the bridge between rival AI buildouts, and the structural risk that bridge now carries, is the story the semiannual report’s headline numbers cannot fully convey on their own.