Massive demand for AI chips delivered record quarterly profits to South Korea's Samsung Electronics on Thursday, but shares fell as investors questioned the resilience of the global tech boom.

Samsung is the world's largest maker of memory chips – components in short supply as advanced types are snapped up for use in data centres powering artificial intelligence.

The company posted July-September operating profit at 107.4 trillion won (US$80.5 billion) – up more than 780 percent year-on-year.

It marked the first time any technology company had reported quarterly operating profit over 100 trillion won, Samsung said.

Net profit jumped more than 510 percent from last year to 75.1 trillion won, while sales reached 195.3 trillion won.

The global race to build data centres to train and run chatbots, image generators and other AI tools has turbocharged the fortunes of Samsung and other chipmakers, despite concerns that the sector may be overvalued.

Samsung shares fell more than five percent on Thursday morning.

Investors were disappointed by a miss of market expectations for operating profit by the semiconductor division, according to Bloomberg News.

The company's memory business achieved "another record-breaking quarter by managing its product mix, with a focus on AI products, amid capacity constraints," Samsung said in a statement.

"Strong demand momentum for servers led to higher market prices across all applications." (AFP)



Edited by Aaron Tam