Samsung Posts Record Q3 Profit While Chinese AI Labs Face Scrutiny Over OpenAI Model Use

Samsung Electronics reported a record operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, equivalent to roughly $80 billion, for the third quarter, a nearly ninefold increase from the same period a year earlier. The surge was driven by booming demand for artificial intelligence memory chips, with Samsung's affiliate Samsung Electro-Mechanics also posting record results on AI-related components. The company said it sees AI infrastructure investment reaching historic levels in 2027 and plans to expand sales of premium system-on-chip products through its System LSI business that year. Bloomberg noted, however, that the chip division's profit narrowly missed analyst estimates, tempering the headline record.

Microsoft delivered strong results alongside Samsung, posting $92.3 billion in quarterly revenue, ahead of analyst expectations of $90.6 billion, with a profit of $36.6 billion. Its Azure cloud division grew 48% and the company's partnership with OpenAI contributed $10 billion in revenue for the quarter, described as bigger than the Bing or Xbox businesses. Alphabet, by contrast, disappointed investors with weaker-than-expected sales across most of its core businesses, sending its shares down roughly 10% and reigniting concerns about the cost of its AI spending commitments.

Separately, The Information reported that Chinese AI laboratories DeepSeek and Moonshot AI drew on outputs from OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model to train new models released this month, using a technique called distillation. Reuters confirmed the report, which raises questions about intellectual property and competitive fairness in AI development and could influence policy debates and investor confidence in the sector.

The US Department of Justice is also probing Nvidia's roughly $13 billion deal to acquire Hugging Face over concerns about the transaction's impact on AI market competition, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, mega-cap hyperscalers are on track to spend around $800 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, up approximately 94% from 2025, with projections exceeding $1 trillion annually from 2027 onward.