Samsung Electronics Includes Amazon in Its Top Five Sales Clients for the First Time, Reshuffling Its AI Customer Base

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[Financial News] Amazon.com, Inc. has been included among Samsung Electronics' top sales clients for the first time, signaling a major reshuffling of its customer base as demand for artificial intelligence (AI) expands. The change appears to reflect the impact of rising data center investment led by cloud big tech companies, which is boosting demand for memory semiconductors.
According to the quarterly report disclosed on the 15th, Samsung Electronics' top five sales clients in the first quarter of this year included Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., Apple Inc., Hong Kong Techtronics Industrial Limited, and Supreme Electronics Limited.
Amazon.com, Inc. entered the top five for the first time this quarter, while Deutsche Telekom AG, which was included last year, dropped out. The top five clients accounted for about 23% of total sales.
Industry observers see the shift as a sign of structural demand realignment centered on AI infrastructure. As global big tech companies such as Amazon.com, Inc. and Alphabet Inc. expand their data center capacity, demand for DRAM and NAND flash memory is rising rapidly.
In fact, major big tech firms including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft (MS) plan to invest about $665 billion, or roughly 998 trillion won, in AI infrastructure this year. Analysts say the expansion of data center-focused investment is lifting the broader memory market.
This trend is also being reflected in prices and earnings. Samsung Electronics' average selling price (ASP) for memory in the first quarter rose about 146% from a year earlier. The increase is believed to have been driven by stronger demand for high-value-added memory used in AI servers.
Samsung Electronics is accelerating its response to the AI memory market, becoming the first in the industry to successfully ship mass-produced High Bandwidth Memory 4 (HBM4) and SOCAMM2 products.
Its business structure is also rapidly shifting toward AI. Samsung Electronics posted sales of 133.8734 trillion won in the first quarter, up 69.2% from a year earlier. Of that, the Device Solutions Division (DS Division) generated 81.7156 trillion won, accounting for 61% of the total. DS Division sales jumped 225% year on year, driving overall performance.
In particular, first-quarter results showed a clear strengthening in server demand, as data center operators expanded capital spending to secure AI infrastructure and early demand for Agentic AI emerged.
Looking ahead to the second half of the year, the expansion of AI services by hyperscalers and the rollout of enterprise services by major large language model (LLM) companies are expected to accelerate the spread of Agentic AI even further.
An industry official said, "The importance of general-purpose servers optimized for a variety of workloads, not just AI servers, is growing." The official added, "Demand for server DRAM and solid-state drives (SSD) is also likely to rise more sharply than expected."
moving@fnnews.com Lee Dong-hyeok Reporter