Samsung offers plan to speed up delivery of AI chips

SEOUL - Samsung Electronics said its contract manufacturing business plans to offer a one-stop shop for clients to get their artificial intelligence (AI) chips made faster.

With clients working with a single channel of communication that directs Samsung’s global No. 1 memory chip, foundry and chip packaging teams at once, the time it takes to produce AI chips – usually weeks – has been cut by around 20 per cent, Samsung said on June 12.

“We are truly living in the age of AI – the emergence of generative AI is completely changing the technology landscape,” said Dr Choi Siyoung, president and general manager at Samsung’s foundry business, at a company event in San Jose, California.

Samsung expects global chip industry revenue to grow to US$778 billion (S$1.05 trillion) by 2028, boosted by AI chips, Dr Choi said.

At a briefing with reporters ahead of the event, executive vice-president of foundry sales and marketing Marco Chisari said the company believes OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman’s loose projections on soaring demand for AI chips are realistic.

Reuters previously reported that Mr Altman had told executives at contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) that he wanted to build roughly three dozen new chip factories.

Samsung is one of the few companies that sells memory chips, offers foundry services and designs chips under the same roof.

That combination has often worked against it in the past, as some clients were nervous that doing business with its foundry might benefit Samsung as a competitor in another field.

However, with skyrocketing demand for AI chips and the need for all the chip parts to be highly integrated to train or infer huge amounts of data fast by using less power, Samsung believes its turnkey approach will be a strength going forward.

The South Korean tech giant also touted its

cutting-edge chip architecture known as gate-all-around (GAA)

, a type of transistor architecture that helps improve chip performance and reduces power consumption. GAA is seen as important to keep making more powerful chips for AI as chips become finer to the point of pushing the boundaries of physics.

Although competitors such as TSMC, which is global foundry No. 1, are also working on chips using GAA, Samsung started applying GAA earlier and said it plans to mass produce its second-generation 3-nanometre (nm) chips using GAA in the second half of 2024.

Samsung also announced its latest 2nm chipmaking process for high-performance computing chips, which places power rails on the backside of the wafer to improve power delivery. Mass production is slated for 2027. REUTERS