Samsung stock jumped nearly 10% on Monday, adding another sharp leg to a rally that has turned the Korean chipmaker into one of the biggest listed plays on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The move came as investors looked ahead to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s expected visit to South Korea, where meetings with major Korean technology groups have stirred fresh hopes of deeper AI partnerships.
Samsung rose as much as 9.5%, pushing its market value above 2,000 trillion won when preferred shares are included.
For traders, the timing was hard to ignore as a CEO visit, a new memory-chip breakthrough and the end of a strike threat all arrived within days of each other.
The Jensen effect: why one CEO visit moved the stock
Huang’s expected trip to South Korea is not being treated as a routine executive stopover.
In the current AI supply chain, Nvidia is the buyer everyone wants, and Samsung is trying to prove it can be more than a catch-up player in high-bandwidth memory.
HBM4E, Samsung’s latest product, is a next-generation AI memory chip that sits beside advanced processors and feeds them data at high speed.
Samsung said last week it had begun shipping industry-first 12-layer HBM4E samples to major global customers, a signal that it may be moving ahead of rivals on the next phase of AI memory.
That matters because Nvidia’s most advanced AI processors depend on reliable HBM supply.
A chipmaker’s CEO visiting a memory supplier does not confirm a deal, but it tells investors where the bottleneck sits.
Samsung has lagged SK Hynix in HBM for much of the AI boom. The HBM4E update gave investors a reason to ask whether that gap is finally narrowing.
Samsung’s good-news pile-up
The rally was not only about Huang as it also came after Samsung removed a major labour overhang that had been weighing on the stock for weeks.
Unionised workers approved a contentious pay and bonus deal last week, averting a planned 18-day strike by about 48,000 workers.
The agreement was backed by roughly 74% of voting union members and includes a profit-linked bonus structure for chip workers, with 10.5% of semiconductor operating profit set aside for special payouts.
For investors, the issue was less about labour relations than supply certainty.
Samsung’s semiconductor plants are central to global memory supply, and any disruption would have hit the company just as AI demand is stretching capacity across the industry.
A court ruling had already reduced the risk of a full production stoppage by requiring essential staffing at some production facilities during any industrial action.
Still, formal ratification removed the last immediate cloud over operations.
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