Samsung loses its throne as the world's top memory maker by revenue

Samsung has long enjoyed a dominant position in the global memory market. It remained the top memory maker by revenue for years but given its struggles with high-bandwidth memory and increased Chinese competition for legacy products, the company has been dethroned.

Local rival SK Hynix has fully capitalized on the AI boom with its HBM sales, which have enabled it to take Samsung's crown and become the world's top memory maker by revenue for the first time.

SK Hynix took over the top spot in Q2 2025, earning $9.66 billion in revenue from memory sales with a 36.2% market share. Samsung wasn't that far behind with $8.94 billion in revenue and a 33.5% market share.

Yet, analysts believe this could signal a changing of the guard as considerable headwinds still persist for Samsung's memory business. It's the first time that SK Hynix has overtaken Samsung on this metric since it was founded back in 1983.

Samsung's HBM chips have struggled to gain traction with NVIDIA, one of the largest buyers of high-bandwidth memory. SK Hynix made aggressive moves into this segment has became NVIDIA's main supplier. Even though NVIDIA was previously using Samsung's GDDR7 chips in its RTX50 GPUs, it later added SK Hynix to this supply chain as well.

Samsung is believed to be aggressively focusing on next-generation HBM4 memory chips to regain lost ground. SK Hynix is also moving fast in this segment as it seeks to retain its dominance. The future will mark intense competition between these two giants of the industry while ensuring that the Korean leadership in the memory segment remains firmly established.