🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Samsung is becoming a more credible alternative to TSMC

• TSMC’s 2nm wafers are said to cost about 50% more than earlier nodes, while Samsung is offering more flexible pricing to win clients 1.
• That price gap has pushed chip designers such as Qualcomm to consider Samsung’s 2nm process for upcoming processors 2.
• Samsung’s 2nm yield is said to run at 55–60%, up from about 20% in the second half of 2025, which suggests steadier output 3.

The chip race is spreading supply beyond Taiwan

• If Samsung gains share, the market could tilt toward two main suppliers after TSMC held 70.2% of revenue versus Samsung’s 7.3% in Q2 2025 1.
• Samsung’s Taylor, Texas fab has drawn interest for 2nm work from Qualcomm and AMD (a US chipmaker best known for PC and data-center processors) 4.
• A second source matters since TSMC has told Nvidia and Broadcom (a major chip supplier for networking and data-center hardware) it cannot meet all capacity requests, while Apple is said to have secured more than half of early 2nm output 5 2.