Samsung stands to benefit as Google and NVIDIA head for a big clash

NVIDIA has been the undisputed AI chip leader for a few years now but there may be some competition on the horizon. Recent reports have indicated that Google may soon start selling its TPU AI reasoning chips to other companies.

Its TPUs are reportedly much less expensive than NVIDIA's AI chips which would make them a compelling option for a lot of companies. No matter how this ends, Samsung is in a unique position to benefit.

Meta is reportedly one of the companies evaluating Google's AI inferencing TPU chip, the company may use it in the data center that's scheduled to come online in 2027.

Google has made the TPU chip in collaboration with Broadcom, a fabless semiconductor designer, to deliver same or better AI performance than NVIDIA's GPU-based chips. Some reports suggest that TPU is up to 80% cheaper than NVIDIA's flagship H100 AI chip.

There may emerge several avenues for Samsung to capitalize on no matter which way the wind blows. If Google's TPU emerges as a bonafide competitor to NVIDIA's chips, the demand for high-bandwidth memory will increase even more, which Samsung will benefit from.

Samsung may also be able to get TPU product orders for its foundry. It has prior experience making mobile chipsets for Google's Pixel series. 2nm capacity is severely limited at TSMC already due to a large number of orders and that leaves Samsung Foundry as the only other viable option for 2nm chip production.

If demand for Google's TPU chip increases, it may have no other option than to use the Korean giant's foundry to produce the chips.