Samsung Electronics' foundry business plans to offer a one-stop service for its clients to accelerate the production speed of their AI chips. This initiative integrates Samsung's globally top-ranked memory chips, wafer fabrication facilities, and chip packaging services, enabling clients to communicate with Samsung's memory chip, wafer fabrication, and chip packaging teams through a single channel, thereby reducing the time to produce AI chips by about 20%.
At an event in San Jose, California, Siyoung Choi, President and General Manager of Samsung Electronics' foundry business, stated, "We truly live in the age of artificial intelligence, and the emergence of generative AI has completely transformed the technological landscape."
Samsung anticipates that by 2028, the global chip industry's revenue will grow to $778 billion, with demand for AI chips being the main driver of this growth. During a briefing with journalists before the event, Marco Chisari, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the foundry, expressed that the company believes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's optimistic forecast about the surging demand for AI chips is realistic and feasible. According to previous reports by Reuters, Altman has informed TSMC's executives that he hopes to build around three dozen new chip factories.
Samsung is one of the few companies that sell memory chips, provide foundry services, and design chips. In the past, this combination sometimes had a negative impact as some clients were concerned that partnering with Samsung's foundry could make Samsung a competitor in another field. However, with the sharp increase in demand for AI chips and the need for highly integrated chip components to quickly train or infer large amounts of data with less power, Samsung believes its one-stop service model will become an advantage in the future.
Additionally, Samsung announced the latest 2nm chip manufacturing process for high-performance computing chips, which will enter mass production in 2027. This manufacturing process places power rails on the back of the chip wafer to improve power delivery.
Moreover, Samsung plans to begin mass production of its second-generation 3nm chips using Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology in the second half of this year. GAA is a transistor architecture that enhances chip performance and reduces power consumption, crucial for developing more powerful AI chips. Although competitors like TSMC, the world's top-ranked foundry, are also developing chips using GAA technology, Samsung has already applied GAA technology earlier and plans to start mass production of its second-generation 3nm chips in the second half of this year.