Samsung's foundry revival is Samsung buying from Samsung
TSMC's fullness has filled Samsung's 4nm lines and handed it price hikes of up to 15%. The biggest customer in those lines is Samsung's own memory division, and Qualcomm's flagship 2nm orders still went to TSMC.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Samsung took this week's Seoul investor event to show a foundry turning: high-performance computing is 28% of foundry revenue, up from 5% in 2017, heading past half by 2029 1. What turned it sits next door. TSMC's 3nm and 5/4nm lines were fully booked in the second quarter, and supply-chain reports say it will raise wafer-out prices 3 to 6% from January 2027, steeper at 2 and 3nm, with order visibility to 2030 12. The squeeze runs past the leading edge: MediaTek's Google TPU orders are capped by capacity, not demand 3.
High-performance computing is 28% of Samsung foundry revenue, up from 5% in 2017
- HPC share of foundry revenue
- Estimate
Data
| HPC share of foundry revenue | |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 5% |
| 2026 | 28% |
| 2029 (estimate) | 50% |
Samsung's own 4nm Pyeongtaek line is running full, and July brought hikes of 10 to 15% on new 4nm and 5nm orders 4. It cannot take every order that arrives: Samsung is reserving capacity for US customers and its own chip production, Reuters reported 5.
The biggest customer in the 4nm line is Samsung itself
Reports this month put numbers on that reservation. More than half of Samsung's roughly 30,000 4nm wafers a month now carry logic base dies for its own HBM4 memory, an allocation set to hold through at least the end of 2026 6.
HBM4 revenue should more than triple quarter on quarter in Q3 and pass 60% of Samsung's HBM revenue in the second half, with each base die booked as foundry revenue 7. Internal memory orders alone have never been enough to fill these lines 7; now they are most of the fill 6. The revival on show in Seoul is Samsung filling capacity Samsung already paid for, at prices TSMC's shortage set.
Qualcomm's 2nm flagships went to TSMC
The order that would prove an outside designer chose Samsung went the other way. Both of Qualcomm's new 2nm Snapdragon flagships, carrying the first mobile CPU past 5GHz, are being built at TSMC, with Samsung merely not ruled out for future products 8.
The scoreboards disagree about the market, not the leader
Two scoreboards for one quarter: Samsung's foundry share is 5.9% or 4%, TSMC's 72.5% or 42%
- TrendForce (top-10, $53.49B)
- Counterpoint (total market, $96.6B)
Data
| TrendForce (top-10, $53.49B) | Counterpoint (total market, $96.6B) | |
|---|---|---|
| TSMC | 72.5% | 42% |
| Samsung | 5.9% | 4% |
TrendForce has Samsung at $3.26B of Q2 foundry revenue, up 1.8% quarter on quarter, share slipping from 6.5% to 5.9% of a record $53.49B top-10 quarter 4. Counterpoint counts a $96.6B market, up 25% year on year, with TSMC at $40.2B and Samsung at 4% 9. TrendForce's base implies about $38.8B for TSMC's quarter against Counterpoint's $40.2B 4: the houses nearly agree on the leader and split on the denominator. Either way, the market grew at rates Samsung did not.
Losses narrow, and the next bill arrives before the volume
The business has lost money since 2022 1. Kiwoom Securities sees the combined foundry and System LSI operating loss narrowing 42% this year, from KRW 6.74 trillion to KRW 3.92 trillion, still about KRW 777 billion in Q3 7. The 2nm ramp and the Taylor, Texas fab add cost before customer volumes arrive 1.
Next year's pricing also starts from TSMC's reference: supply-chain reports name Samsung among the foundries under pressure to follow the January 2027 hikes 2. Outside demand is real but unconverted: 2nm projects from a major cloud provider and AI customers, a Broadcom memorandum worth over $200 billion through 2030, reported Meta talks over a $6.5B order 75. None of it is shipping flagship silicon.
The tell is the second order
This year's bridge is self-supply and overflow pricing, and it is worth exactly what those are worth. The trade changes when an outside customer's next flagship tapes out at Samsung. As Hana Securities' Kim Rok-ho put it: "The real test is whether the customer comes back with its next chip" 1.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
