“Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily”, July 16 — The torrent of the AI era has brought out Nvidia, the king of next-generation chips, and brought along suppliers such as SK Hynix and TSMC. Behind the reshuffle of the industry landscape and changes in seat order, a new generation of industry order is taking shape. Some are standing at the head of the tide, others are chasing, and others are being left behind.

“Laggards” such as Samsung face “internal worries” and “external problems” at the same time.

Samsung's largest strike in history broke out on July 8. It was originally scheduled to go on strike for three days, but since senior company officials had no intention of coming forward to negotiations, the trade union decided to extend the strike “indefinitely.” After that, the strike went all the way to Samsung's HBM chip factory. The latter can be described as the “stronghold of the current AI landscape” of Samsung.

A Samsung chip engineer revealed that even though the company had replaced the head of the semiconductor department, “we haven't seen much change. The internal atmosphere within the company is rather sluggish. Employees are generally dissatisfied with the pay and think their treatment is worse than SK Hynix; many are considering leaving Samsung and joining a competitor company.”

“Workers are discouraged and demoralized because their pay is too low,” said a Samsung smartphone business researcher. “The management seems lost, and the workers feel helpless.”

The Samsung home appliance sales team also had a sense of crisis. “While I was working for the company, I was used to sales growth, but now I have seen a decline in growth for the first time.”

▌“ Skills are not as good as people”

Employee anger, dissatisfaction, and depression are on the one hand, and “poor skill” is Samsung's greater distress.

In Nvidia's AI GPU supply chain list, SK Hynix and TSMC are the two most prominent companies: the former supplies HBM to Nvidia, while the latter directly monopolizes the AI GPU manufacturing OEM.

As for Samsung, which can produce both HBM and foundry, “it's not good at both ends” — the employee's phrase “it lags behind SK Hynix in terms of HBM and can't catch up with TSMC in terms of foundry” is the most realistic picture of this electronics giant right now.

Samsung's HBM has been reported many times that it will soon be supplied to Nvidia, but the tests have never met the standards and can only wander outside of Nvidia's HBM supply door. Some analysts believe that Samsung's HBM mainly faces two major problems: the first is chip cooling, and the second is the strict standards of customers such as Nvidia.

“As a leading memory supplier in history, this is very worrying,” said Myron Xie, an analyst at SemiAnalysis. “HBM is a very profitable product, and Samsung has missed an opportunity.”

In this AI boom, entering the Nvidia supply chain means, to a certain extent, that performance is guaranteed and the stock price is on the “rocket.” It is also at this crossroads that the stock prices of the two South Korean chip giants, Samsung and SK Hynix, have taken a very different trend.

In the foundry business, Samsung is also trying to face TSMC with 2nm and 3nm.

A month ago, well-known analyst Guo Mingyi pointed out that the Samsung Exynos 2500 may not be shipped because the yield of its 3nm foundry is lower than expected, and Qualcomm may become the exclusive SoC supplier for the Samsung Galaxy S25.

Guo Mingyi did not clearly say how low the “yield rate below expectations” actually is, but to a certain extent, it also echoes a previous revelation from Korean media DealSite: Samsung's 3nm process has major problems, and the trial production chips are all flawed, and the yield is 0%.

In contrast, Samsung's 2nm seems to have ushered in the dawn.

On July 9, Samsung confirmed that it has received an order from Japanese AI company Preferred Networks (PFN) to manufacture AI chips for the company using a 2nm process and advanced packaging services.

For Samsung, this order has at least two meanings — it is the first 2nm OEM order officially announced by Samsung, while PFN has been a customer of TSMC for many years but is now switching to Samsung 2nm.

However, due to this alone, it is still difficult for Samsung to shake TSMC's dominant position in the global foundry field for the time being. The analyst pointed out, “Although customers do want a second foundry to choose from, what customers value most is technical quality and stable supply, but Samsung's chip foundry has not yet been able to provide these.”

It can be said that the semiconductor business carries the ambitions of the entire Samsung Group.

Of Samsung Electronics' capital expenditure of 53.1 trillion won (about 278.1 billion yuan) in 2023, its semiconductor DS division accounted for more than 90%, reaching 48.4 trillion won (approximately 253.5 billion yuan); in the first quarter of this year, out of 11.3 trillion won spent on semiconductors, another 9.7 trillion won went to semiconductors — in these five quarters alone, Samsung spent more than 300 billion yuan on the semiconductor business RMB.

Samsung defines itself as “the only company with cutting-edge foundry technology, memory chips, and advanced packaging technology,” but it can also be seen from customer choices that when Samsung is not good at any of these aspects, “one-stop service is of little significance to chip design companies.”

Samsung, which was left behind by rivals in the AI era, is catching up, and it remains to be seen how the results will turn out. After all, as Nomura analyst CW Chung pointed out, “Once the wrong strategy is adopted and the wrong chip is developed, it will affect three years of development. But now (for Samsung) the worst seems to be over.”