Intel – the US company that dominated the chip manufacturing sector for decades – has ceded its crown to Samsung, as evidenced by the two companies’ annual financial reports.

First noted by Bloomberg, the change of leadership was signaled by Intel’s annual revenue of $62.8 billion USD being surpassed by the $69.1 billion USD generated by Samsung’s semiconductor division.

It’s not a straightforward comparison to make, since Intel’s focus is on x86 processors, where it remains the leader by a great distance, and Samsung’s strength is in producing memory and flash storage but in monetary terms, the latter business is now bigger.

Beyond the financials, Samsung’s memory business also looks to be far more important and fundamental to the future of technology than Intel’s traditional CPUs.

These days, you’ll struggle to find a smartphone or tablet without Samsung RAM inside it, and the company also commands more than a third of the solid-state drive storage market.

In its latest quarterly report, Samsung anticipates growing “demand for high-density memory products for cloud servers and for chipsets required for automotive electronics and AI.”

Media reports indicate that for a better sense of the scale of Samsung’s chip production business, consider that this company is also among the leading producers of TVs, every sort of home appliance, smartphone displays, and it’s the world’s most prolific smartphone vendor too.