The number of Samsung foundry customers exceeded 100
Samsung announced in a high-profile last year that it will invest $151.5 billion in the construction of fabs in the next ten years, and will mass-produce the 3nm GAA process in the first half of 2022, and the second-generation 3nm process will be mass-produced in 2023. Samsung hopes to increase the production capacity and accelerate the research and development of process technology in the next few years to narrow the distance with TSMC. Although industry insiders believe that Samsung is facing many difficulties, as the world’s second-largest wafer foundry, Samsung’s series of actions convey its determination to catch up with the industry leader in terms of technology and production capacity.
Image: Samsung
According to DigiTimes, the number of Samsung foundry customers has exceeded 100. Judging from the current situation, the foundry market is still hot in 2022, and Samsung will blossom more and develop in an all-around way. Samsung is still in its infancy in chip manufacturing in the fields of automobiles and artificial intelligence, which will be the key to whether its foundry can continue to grow in the future.
Since Samsung separated its foundry business in 2017, it has grown from 30 customers in the earliest to more than 100. Samsung is said to be aiming to have more than 300 customers by 2026. In contrast, industry leader TSMC is expected to have more than 500 customers in 2022, five times that of Samsung.
Samsung hopes to mass-produce 3nm process nodes as soon as possible by expanding capital expenditures to win orders from AMD and Qualcomm. It is expected that cumulative capital expenditures in the next three years will account for about 70% of its revenue, while TSMC will probably be at 50%. Samsung is currently snapping up more EUV lithography machines to close the quantitative gap with TSMC. According to statistics, as of 2020, TSMC will have about 40 EUV lithography machines, and Samsung will have about 18, less than half of TSMC. It is expected that Samsung will purchase about 18 EUV lithography machines in 2022, narrowing the quantitative gap with TSMC, and the total number will reach about 60% of TSMC.
