The companies selling memory to AI builders outearned their biggest customers last quarter. Nikkei Asia reports that five leading memory suppliers together posted higher operating and net profit than five of the largest US technology firms, the first time that has happened.
The quarter behind the milestone was extraordinary. SK Hynix, Samsung and Kioxia each reported record results for the September period, with operating margins near 80 percent. Micron’s fiscal 2026 revenue climbed 256 percent to $133.2B.
Why the makers moved ahead of the buyers
High-bandwidth memory sits on the critical path for every training cluster and inference rack sold. Supply has not caught up with demand, which handed pricing power to a handful of factories in South Korea, Japan and the United States.
Hyperscalers, meanwhile, are absorbing that cost inside capital budgets that already look stretched. Memory accounts for roughly one-third of data center spend, which explains why the buyers have spent much of the past quarter negotiating supply rather than celebrating margins.
The arrangement may not hold
Memory has historically been the most cyclical corner of semiconductors, with booms that end in gluts. Every major supplier is now adding capacity, and that capacity arrives on a delay measured in years.
A second brake is demand. If the AI buildout slows even modestly, the same tight market flips and the profit lead disappears as quickly as it appeared. For now the share of value has shifted down the supply chain, and the buyers are the ones paying for it.
