Samsung Electronics Reaches $1 Trillion Market Cap Amid AI Chip Demand

Jay Y. Lee is now South Korea’s richest person with a net worth of $34 billion, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list as of May 11, 2026. 4 billion since late March 2026 as shares of Samsung Electronics soared.

Four members of the Lee family are the top four richest people in South Korea as of May 2026. 2 billion in fourth. Boo-jin Lee serves as president and chief executive of Hotel Shilla.

Seo-hyun Lee is president of strategic planning at Samsung C&T. Hong Ra-hee resigned in 2017 from her positions as director of the Samsung Museum of Art, known as Leeum, and the Ho-Am Art Museum. The Lee family derives the bulk of their wealth from shares of Samsung Electronics.

Those shares have increased five-fold over the past year as of May 2026 and surged 40 percent over the past month. Samsung Electronics’ market capitalization hit $1 trillion last week. It is the second Asian company after TSMC to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization.

9 trillion won, a 69 percent increase year over year. 2 trillion won, which jumped 756 percent from the same period a year earlier. Samsung Electronics is the largest maker of memory chips needed for AI by sales.

It produces high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, used to power AI chips from Nvidia, AMD and Alphabet. The company also produces NAND flash used for long-term storage in solid-state drives deployed in data centers. Barclays analysts expect Samsung to triple HBM revenue this year.

They stated that the demand/supply imbalance for HBM shows no signs of improving any time soon. The analysts added that memory content will take a material step up in 2027 datacentre architectures. Jay Y. Lee is the executive chairman of Samsung Electronics.

His late father, Lee Kun-hee, died in 2020 at age 78. Lee Kun-hee left his family with one of the largest inheritance tax bills in South Korea’s history.

Byung-chull founded Samsung in 1938 as a trading company. The business later expanded into a sprawling empire with interests in food, textiles and electronics, among other sectors.

““The demand/supply imbalance shows no signs of improving any time soon and with memory content taking a material step up in 2027 datacentre architectures, the accelerating capacity being brought online is unlikely to close the gap materially this year or next in our view.””

“— Barclays analysts”