Samsung Electronics wins $200 billion Broadcom AI chip partnership, boosting foundry push

Samsung Electronics said on Saturday it struck a pact with U.S. chip designer Broadcom to widen cooperation across memory chips, contract chip making and advanced packaging envisaged to exceed $200 billion until 2030.

Winning long-term production commitments from Broadcom, one of the world's leading custom AI chip designers, could boost utilisation ‌at Samsung's ⁠advanced ⁠manufacturing facilities to pull ahead in the race to supply AI chips.

"The expanded collaboration ... reflects Samsung's focus on supporting customers with end-to-end semiconductor technologies across an increasingly diverse range of AI and high-performance computing applications," the company said in a statement.


The tie-up comes as global technology companies increasingly develop their own custom AI accelerators, rather than relying solely on ⁠general-purpose graphics processors, ‌driving demand for specialised chip design and manufacturing partnerships.

The two firms' memorandum of understanding underscores Samsung's efforts to beef ⁠up its position in AI semiconductors by expanding its long-term ties with Broadcom amid growing demand up for custom AI processors.

The next five years of collaboration will combine Broadcom's expertise in designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or chips for specific tasks, with Samsung's manufacturing capabilities.

The deal provides for Broadcom's next-generation communications chips, designed for high-speed data transfer, to be made with Samsung's sub-2-nanometre process technology, Samsung said.

The ‌two will also collaborate on next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) products.

The partnership could help strengthen Samsung's foundry business, as it seeks to narrow the gap with industry ⁠leader TSMC by wooing major technology customers.

Last month, co-CEO and chip division head Jun Young-hyun said he discussed next-generation foundry cooperation with Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, including future HBM4E and HBM5 memory products.

Samsung said this year it expected to secure more advanced 2-nanometre foundry orders in the near term after discussions with major tech companies. Last year, it won a $16.5-billion contract to make logic chips for EV maker Tesla.