Samsung aims to make the world's most advanced chips in 5 years, as it plays catch up with TSMC (2024)

FAQs

Does Samsung make chips or TSMC? ›

It will also establish an advanced packaging operation, an R&D fab, and R&D as well. Samsung is the largest memory chip manufacturer in the world with a global market share of over 45% in Q4 of 2023, and it also has the second largest foundry business after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Samsung, playing a distant second to TSMC for quite some time, has vowed to launch the 1.4-nm chip manufacturing node by 2027, leapfrogging both TSMC and Intel Foundry Services (IFS) by a wide margin. The South Korean electronics conglomerate is also confident about producing the 2-nm chips in 2025 as planned.

TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is the world's largest and most advanced contract chip manufacturer. TSMC makes semiconductors for companies from Apple to Nvidia .

From south of Seoul to north of Austin, our foundry superhighway builds and delivers the chips to make the world-class devices with almost two decades of reliable capacity and best-in-class cycle times.

Apple will receive all of TSMC's first-generation 3-nanometer process chips this year for upcoming iPhones, Macs, and iPads, according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes. As early as May, Apple was known to have booked nearly 90% of the Taiwanese pure-play foundry for its upcoming next-gen devices.

For a time, Apple used multiple sources for its processors, using Samsung-made processors in some iPhones and TSMC-made chips in others. But all of Apple's chips have been manufactured at TSMC for most of the last decade.

Most of the leading fabless semiconductor companies such as AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek, Qualcomm and Nvidia, are customers of TSMC, as are emerging companies such as Allwinner Technology, HiSilicon, Spectra7, and UNISOC.

TSMC leads the foundry industry with a market share of nearly 60%, according to technology market research firm Counterpoint. Samsung ranks second with a share of about 13%, followed by Taiwan's UMC at 6%.

Apple relies on third parties like Samsung and Micron for memory. “Our aspiration is the product,” Srouji said, when asked if Apple will try to design every part of its chips. “We want to build the best products on the planet.

Taiwan produces over 60% of the world's semiconductors and over 90% of the most advanced ones. Most are manufactured by a single company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC).

Which is the powerful chip in the world? ›

The Blackwell B200 GPU, created by US tech giant Nvidia, significantly boosts AI training and processing speeds. This development could lead to breakthroughs in areas like the metaverse, manufacturing, robotics, and healthcare.

Sometimes called the most important company in the world, TSMC (officially Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) produces an estimated 90% of the world's super-advanced semiconductor chips, which are used to power everything from smartphones to artificial intelligence applications.

Apple fully controls the integration of Apple silicon chips with the company's hardware and software products. Johny Srouji is in charge of Apple's silicon design. Manufacturing of the chips is outsourced to semiconductor contract manufacturers such as TSMC.

Samsung Foundry's integrated foundry network builds the chips that drive product innovation for our customers from factory robotics to telemedicine to the expanding digital frontier.

TSMC remains the predominant manufacturer of Nvidia's high-end AI chips.

As a leader in the global semiconductor industry, Samsung has been a continuous innovator in semiconductor technology for the last 50 years. And along that journey, we've been proud to be an integral part of Central Texas since 1996, when we first started chip manufacturing in the United States.

Apple, Google, and Samsung all have their own in-house chips with Apple's A series, Google's Tensor, and Samsung's Exynos.

Samsung, one of the largest chip makers in the world, planned to invest a total of 500 trillion won (US$371 billion) by 2047 in a “mega-cluster” semiconductor project south of Seoul, the South Korean government said in mid-January.

Samsung Foundry's integrated foundry network builds the chips that drive product innovation for our customers from factory robotics to telemedicine to the expanding digital frontier.