Samsung Electronics (005930. KS) said its contract manufacturing business would create a one-stop shop for customers wanting to get their hands on AI chips faster by pulling together its global No.1 memory chip, foundry, and chip packaging services.
On Wednesday, Samsung announced that by connecting its customers to a singular communication channel directing Samsung's memory chip foundry and chip packaging teams, weeks have been cut, some 20%, off the AI-chip development process.
"We are really living in the age of AI, and the advent of generative AI is truly changing the technology landscape," said Siyoung Choi during the Samsung event in San Jose, California.
Samsung forecasts the global chip industry's revenue to reach $778 billion in 2028, mainly driven by AI chips.
At a briefing with reporters ahead of the event, Executive Vice President of Foundry Sales and Marketing Marco Chisari said the company finds OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's loose projections on soaring demand for AI chips realistic.
Altman said to executives at contract chipmaker TSMC that he aimed to build about three dozen new chip factories, according to Reuters.
Samsung is one of a dwindling number of companies that both makes memory chips and designs its own chips under one roof.
That combination has often worked against it in the past, as some clients were nervous that doing business with its foundry might benefit Samsung as a competitor in another field.
But with demand skyrocketing for AI chips that require high integration of all the parts of a chip to either train or infer massive amounts of data fast using less power, Samsung believes its turnkey approach is a strength going forward.
The South Korean tech giant has also tried to boast of its cutting-edge chip architecture called gate-all-around (GAA)—one type of transistor that enhances the performance and lowers the power consumption of chips.
The industry sees GAA as important to the continued push to develop more powerful chips for AI as the march toward finer and finer chips begins to push at the boundaries of physics.
While competitors like Global Foundry No. 1 TSMC are also working on chips using GAA, Samsung started applying the GAA at a previous time with the company stating that it will be mass-producing its 2nd-generation 3-nanometer chips using the technology in the second half of this year.
It also announced its latest 2-nanometre chipmaking process for high-performance computing, where power rails are located on the backside of the wafer to enhance the delivery of power. Mass production is scheduled for 2027.
