KB Securities said on the 26th that Samsung Electronics is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of the expansion of Google's tensor processing unit (TPU) ecosystem. It kept a Buy rating and a target price of 160,000 won. Samsung Electronics closed at 99,300 won the previous day.
Kim Dong-Won, an analyst at KB Securities, said, "Samsung Electronics is expected to directly benefit from the memory supply chain diversification strategies of Google, Broadcom, Amazon and Meta, and from the expansion of the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, based on its high memory supply share with North American big tech companies."
Google has succeeded in vertically integrating AI hardware and software through its in-house AI inference chip, the TPU, and is actively pushing to sell TPUs—previously used only for its own cloud servers—to external corporations. Meta is considering installing Google TPUs in its own data centers in 2027, and the build-out of a Gemini ecosystem centered on TPUs is expected to gain full momentum.
Kim added, "In the end, reliance on Nvidia's GPU supply chain is expected to gradually decline," and "concerns about an AI bubble, stemming from big tech's concentrated purchases of Nvidia GPUs that led to excessive capital expenditures and depreciation, will ease as the AI ecosystem diversifies."
KB Securities estimated that next year Samsung Electronics will post operating profit of 97 trillion won, up 108% from a year earlier. In particular, it projected fourth-quarter (Oct.–Dec.) operating profit this year at 19 trillion won, up 192% from a year earlier.
Kim said, "As the AI market rapidly expands into inference, the amount of memory adopted in general servers is also surging, positively affecting server memory demand," adding, "for Broadcom, which handles Google's TPU design and production, Samsung Electronics holds the No. 1 share in memory supply, so it is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of the future expansion of Google's TPU ecosystem."