Analyzing TSMC's fab expansion roadmap — multi-fab N2 ramp, CoWoS, SoIC, and uncorking bottlenecks
Intel's fab roadmap examined — Arizona, Ohio, Ireland, and the two deadlines deciding 14A process node
The same presentation gave Samsung's first confirmation of where High-NA EUV enters production: not at 2nm or 1.4nm, but with the 1nm-class SF1A node around 2030. "We believe High-NA EUV will become necessary from A10 and below," Chang Min Park, Master VP of Technology at Samsung Electronics, told the conference, saying the tooling needs further improvement before it can carry mass production at larger nodes. SF1A is slated to run alongside SF1.4+, an enhanced 1.4nm variant that stays on proven Low-NA flows, so customers wary of High-NA's smaller exposure field and higher cost will have a fallback on familiar tooling.
As always, roadmaps live and die by their yields, and Samsung's is no exception. The company's first-gen 2nm yields were reported as climbing through 2025, but as of April, they still sat near 55%, below the level the business needs for profitable high-volume output, with reporting suggesting Qualcomm could route work back to TSMC as a result. These figures are obviously estimates rather than Samsung disclosures, and they've varied across sources, but they're consistent enough to say that yield — not capacity or customers — is Samsung's biggest constraint with 2nm.
To compensate, Samsung has been pulling back aggressively on price to stay competitive. The company is reported to have cut its 2nm wafer price to around $20,000 , undercutting TSMC by roughly 33%, a discount that'll no doubt win price-sensitive work but compress the margin on a node already running below break-even yields. Undercutting on price while trailing on yield is a difficult combination to fund, which is why the unit's losses have set the pace of its recovery.
Samsung's anchor customer on 2nm is its own mobile chip unit. The Exynos 2600, built on SF2, is the node's first commercial product and powers the standard Galaxy S26 and S26+. However, the Galaxy S26 Ultra runs Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs worldwide, and the Exynos reportedly covers only around a quarter to a third of S26 builds because yields cap how many it can supply.
A successor, the Exynos 2700 on SF2P, is in development for the Galaxy S27, with mass production targeted for the second half of this year. Samsung using its own processor to prove a node before committing to external customers is the same play we saw the company run at 3nm.
Externally, 2nm customers remain thin. The clearest to date is Japanese AI firm Preferred Networks, which Samsung confirmed as a turnkey customer for SF2 plus 2.5D packaging on AI accelerators. Tesla's AI6 is obviously the biggest name, and there are reports of a 2nm CPU order from a North American fabless customer identified as AMD and of advanced-stage talks with Qualcomm over Snapdragon work, though neither is confirmed.
The strongest case for Samsung's integrated model sits in memory rather than logic. The company said it shipped the industry's first commercial HBM4 in February this year, running at 11.7 Gbps per pin against the 8 Gbps JEDEC baseline and extendable to 13 Gbps, with per-stack bandwidth up to 3.3 TB/s. The logic base die under that stack is built on Samsung's own 4nm foundry process, which lets the company source the base die in-house rather than buying it from TSMC as some rivals must, and it's reported to be moving the base die for custom HBM to its 2nm process for samples in 2027.
That capability has translated into qualification, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirming in June that Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron had all passed certification to supply HBM4 for the Vera Rubin platform. Samsung is still the smaller supplier, with analysts putting SK hynix at roughly two-thirds of Nvidia's HBM4 allocation and Samsung in the mid-20% range. Still, qualification of all three vendors ends the period when Samsung was locked out of Nvidia's top memory tier.
Samsung has also moved early on the next step, having begun shipping HBM4E samples around May, claiming roughly 3.6 TB/s of bandwidth, and is positioning custom HBM with logic-based dies tailored to individual accelerator customers, including Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and hyperscalers, with samples due in 2027. SK hynix followed with its own HBM4E samples weeks later, so although the lead is measured in weeks rather than generations, memory is the part of Samsung's business where it competes at the front rather than from behind.
Samsung has reshuffled its foundry leadership twice in a year, naming Han Jin-man to head the business in November 2024 and restoring a dual-CEO structure over the Device Solutions division in November 2025, with Jun Young-hyun over the DS division and Roh Tae-moon added as co-CEO.
The reshuffles followed a stretch in which foundry and System LSI losses were put by analysts at 3.18 trillion won for 2024, before reportedly narrowing below 1 trillion won by the third quarter of 2025 as utilization recovered from around 50% in late 2024 toward roughly 80% in early 2026. Chairman Jay Y. Lee has publicly ruled out spinning the foundry off to address the conflict that running it alongside the Exynos design unit creates for fabless customers, saying the company intends to grow the business rather than separate it.
The spending behind that recovery is massive, with Samsung having guided to more than 110 trillion won in combined facilities and R&D investment for 2026. The Device Solutions division is taking the bulk of a 10.2 trillion won first-quarter capital outlay, and Taylor ramp investments are set to rise from the second quarter onward. Ultimately, the company is funding an advanced-node buildout on both sides of the Pacific while the unit that runs those fabs is only now climbing back toward break-even.
In Q4 2025, TrendForce put TSMC's foundry revenue at $33.7 billion against roughly $3.4 billion for Samsung's foundry unit, leaving Samsung second with around 7% of the market. By Q1 2026, the same source had TSMC at $35.86 billion and Samsung near $3.2 billion, a gap of roughly 11 to one. Samsung is reported to be targeting foundry profitability by 2027, and a 20% market share, and its own 2026 guidance promises double-digit revenue growth and improved profitability driven by advanced nodes. The company is also reported to be reviewing a second Taylor fab and moving foundry leadership closer to its U.S. customers, a sign it's planning for the demand it hasn't yet converted.
Whether that holds depends on the same metric that has dogged the Taylor launch and the Tesla schedule. SF2 mass production and a marquee customer are both in place; what closes the distance to TSMC, or fails to, is yield reaching the level that makes a $44 billion fab and a $16.5 billion contract pay for themselves.
Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.\u00a0 Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.\u00a0 ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-25/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Luke James Social Links Navigation Contributor Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/samsungs-fab-roadmap-examined#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/my-account
- Judge clears Nine PBS to retrieve 70 years of archival TV data — court rules station owns 50TB of data in Iron Mountain servers after host went under
- Secret tracking device placed in rare book ends up in Amazon processing facility — destroying books to train AI models is 'all' the Vegas warehouse does
- Snag AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X3D with 16GB of RAM, motherboard, and a cooler for just $609 — save $124 on a B650 ATX board and Corsair Vengeance RAM for a new gaming
- AI Leaders Propose SAFE Guidelines for Cybersecurity Transparency
- You can now buy a delidded Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition for $1,403 — stripped dual-cache offering is $500 more expensive than regular version
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.