Samsung has been feeling the heat in the semiconductor market but the company is now looking at artificial intelligence as a major driver of future growth. The company will reportedly be going all out on AI chips and forge close partnerships with other players in the space, such as AI, to cement its position as a diversified supplier of semiconductors.
It's going to be easier said than done, though, as Samsung continues to face challenges in securing orders from major AI chip designers like NVIDIA to rivals like SK Hynix and TSMC. SK Hynix has won exclusive supply rights for select high bandwidth memory NVIDIA chips and TSMC has been contracted to produce NVIDIA's H100 GPU.
Samsung could seek a close collaboration with OpenAI
Things have already been challenging for Samsung in the memory chip market. Its DRAM market share has reduced to 38.9% in Q3 2023 compared to SK Hynix's 34.3%. It's also lagging behind TSMC and Intel in foundry sales.
Samsung is now looking at a turnkey strategy to leverage its strengths in chip production, large scale integration, chip design, and foundry manufacturing. It seeks to collaborate with OpenAI, the company behind the wildly popular ChatGPT, as it views the company as a big partner for its chip strategy.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visited Seoul last month and met key Samsung Electronics executives from the chip division. Company officials have highlighted how Samsung is the only semiconductor company that can comprehensively handle chip design, memory chip production, foundry, and packaging. This enables Samsung to provide customers with highly tailored solutions through chip and package co-design.
Market analysts in South Korea believe that Samsung could become a leader in AI turnkey solutions over the next two to three years. Its diverse foundry production capabilities that range from 3 to 5nm as well as legacy 14 to 28nm processes will prove to be helpful in this regard as well.
