TSMC fully booked at 2nm through 2028, opening door for Samsung
Samsung Electronics is emerging as a potential beneficiary of a tightening supply crunch at TSMC, as surging demand for artificial intelligence chips pushes the industry leader’s most advanced capacity to its limits through 2028.
According to industry sources Monday, TSMC is effectively fully booked for the coming years, with orders for its cutting-edge 2-nanometer process flooding in from major customers including Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and Apple. Even its planned Arizona fab, targeting mass production around 2030, is reportedly largely reserved before construction has begun.
The bottleneck is elevating Samsung — the only other company capable of producing chips at the 2nm node — as a viable alternative for advanced chip customers.
While TSMC accounted for about 72 percent of the global foundry market in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with Samsung’s roughly 7 percent, the gap narrows significantly at the leading edge. Production below 5nm is effectively a duopoly between the two.
Samsung, however, enters the race from a weaker base. As an integrated device manufacturer, memory chips primarily drive profit, while its foundry business has long struggled with losses, weighed down by yield issues and a limited customer base.
That narrative is beginning to shift amid the AI boom and improvements in its advanced process technology.
Samsung has raised yields on its 2nm process to around 60 percent and continues to improve performance. It is also gaining traction with key customers, securing orders from companies such as Tesla and Apple, expanding engagement with Nvidia, and entering discussions with AMD on next-generation collaboration. Interest from Arm is also building.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said Samsung is producing the Grok 3 language processing unit using its 4nm process, highlighting its growing role in advanced chip manufacturing.
Samsung is now moving to capitalize on the supply bottleneck, with its Taylor, Texas, fab set to begin operations in the second half of this year.
“Foundry bottlenecks have become severe as demand surges,” an industry official said. “Samsung is looking at ways to operate its facilities more flexibly to capture this demand.”
As part of that strategy, Samsung is accelerating plans for a “hybrid” semiconductor production system that can switch between advanced logic chips and next-generation memory.
At its Pyeongtaek campus in Gyeonggi Province, construction of the P5 complex is progressing faster than expected. The facility — designed as Samsung’s first “triple fab” with three floors and up to 12 cleanrooms — is increasingly expected to support both memory and foundry production, although final line allocation has yet to be decided.
The flexibility could allow Samsung to respond more quickly to shifts in demand, particularly as AI-driven workloads blur the lines between memory and logic chips.
Still, analysts caution that the opportunity hinges on execution.
“The key question is whether Samsung can turn current supply constraints into sustained customer growth rather than a temporary uplift,” an industry official said.
herim@heraldcorp.com
