Samsung announces plans to accelerate AI chip supply

Seoul/San Jose
Reuters
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Samsung Electronics has announced plans to offer its contract manufacturing business a one-stop shop to help customers produce artificial intelligence (AI) chips more quickly, integrating the world's No. 1 memory chip, foundry and chip packaging services to capitalize on the AI ​​boom.

Samsung said on Wednesday it has cut the time it takes to manufacture AI chips, which typically takes several weeks, by about 20% by working through a single communication channel where customers can simultaneously send instructions to Samsung's memory chip, foundry and chip packaging teams.

“We are truly living in the age of AI, and the emergence of generative AI is completely changing the technology landscape,” Siyeon Choi, president and general manager of the company's foundry business, said at a Samsung event in San Jose, California.

Samsung expects global chip industry revenue to grow to $778 billion by 2028, thanks to AI chips, Choi said.

At a press conference ahead of the event, Marco Chisari, executive vice president of Foundry sales and marketing, said the company believes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's high-level predictions about a surge in demand for AI chips are realistic.

Reuters previously reported that Altman told executives at contract chipmaker TSMC that he wanted to build about 30 new chip factories.

Samsung is one of the few companies that sells memory chips, provides foundry services and designs chips under the same roof, a combination that has often worked against Samsung in the past, as some customers worried that doing business with Samsung's foundries would benefit competitors in other areas.

But as demand for AI chips soars and all the chip parts need to be highly integrated to train or infer data quickly and with less power, Samsung believes its turnkey approach will be an advantage going forward.

The South Korean tech giant also touted its cutting-edge chip architecture known as gate-all-around (GAA), a type of transistor architecture that helps improve chip performance and reduce power consumption.

As chips get smaller and smaller, pushing the boundaries of physics, GAA is expected to be critical to continuing to create more powerful chips for AI.

While competitors such as TSMC, the world's No. 1 foundry, are also working on developing chips using GAA, Samsung has started applying GAA earlier and said it plans to mass-produce second-generation 3-nanometer chips using GAA later this year.

Samsung also unveiled its latest 2-nanometer chip manufacturing process for high-performance computing chips, which places power rails on the backside of the wafer for improved power delivery, with mass production expected in 2027.