Samsung
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Last reviewed
Jun 9, 2026
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Samsung Electronics is a South Korean electronics manufacturer headquartered in Suwon and the flagship company of the Samsung Group conglomerate. The world's largest maker of memory chips and among the largest smartphone vendors, Samsung sits at more points of the AI value chain than almost any other company: it sells AI-branded consumer devices (Galaxy AI), supplies the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that feeds AI accelerators, operates the world's second-largest contract chip foundry, and invests in humanoid and home robotics. Its AI story over 2023 to 2026 has been one of contrasts: a celebrated consumer AI launch with the Galaxy S24, a painful multi-year stumble in HBM that ceded leadership to SK Hynix, and a recovery capped by HBM4 shipments to NVIDIA and a $16.5 billion Tesla foundry contract.
Samsung Electronics was founded in 1969 and is led by executive chairman Lee Jae-yong. The company is organized into two main arms: the Device eXperience (DX) division, covering smartphones, TVs, and appliances, and the Device Solutions (DS) division, covering memory, system LSI (chip design), and foundry. Jun Young-hyun, appointed semiconductor chief in May 2024 amid the HBM crisis, leads DS [5].
For fiscal 2025 Samsung reported record annual revenue of KRW 333.6 trillion and operating profit of KRW 43.6 trillion, with the fourth quarter setting all-time highs (KRW 93.8 trillion revenue, KRW 20.1 trillion operating profit) on surging HBM and DRAM sales [22]. The AI memory supercycle continued into 2026: first-quarter operating profit rose more than eightfold year on year to a record as AI demand created a memory supply crunch [23].
Samsung introduced Galaxy AI alongside the Galaxy S24 series, announced on January 17, 2024 at its Unpacked event in San Jose [2]. The launch was paired with a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud that made Samsung the first partner to deploy Gemini Pro and the Imagen 2 image model through Vertex AI on smartphones; Gemini Nano ran on-device for features such as Magic Compose in Google Messages [1][2]. Headline S24 features included Live Translate for calls, Interpreter, Chat Assist, Note and Transcript summarization, Generative Edit photo fill, and the debut of Circle to Search, co-launched with Google [1][2].
Samsung pursues a hybrid strategy that mixes partner models with its own: cloud-based Gemini for heavier tasks, and on-device processing for latency- and privacy-sensitive ones. Its internal foundation model family, Samsung Gauss, was unveiled in November 2023 with language, code, and image variants; the second-generation Gauss2, announced at the Samsung Developer Conference Korea in November 2024, is a multimodal model offered in Compact (on-device), Balanced, and Supreme (mixture-of-experts) configurations supporting 9 to 14 languages [3].
Distribution is Samsung's core advantage. Galaxy AI reached more than 200 million devices in 2024 via flagship launches and One UI updates, and at its July 2025 Unpacked the company committed to 400 million Galaxy AI devices by the end of 2025; Samsung also said more than 70 percent of Galaxy S25 users engaged with Galaxy AI features [4]. The Galaxy S25 series (January 2025) deepened the Google integration, making Gemini the default assistant and adding agentic cross-app actions and the personalized Now Brief. The Galaxy S26 series, unveiled at an AI-focused Unpacked in San Francisco on February 25, 2026, introduced the Exynos 2600, the industry's first 2nm gate-all-around mobile processor, which powers the S26 and S26+ in most markets and brings a substantially faster NPU for on-device AI [17]. Samsung has extended AI branding across the home as well, with Bespoke AI appliances and ambient intelligence features in its SmartThings platform.
Samsung is the world's largest memory chipmaker, but it fell conspicuously behind in the memory segment that matters most for AI. SK Hynix co-developed HBM with AMD in the 2010s, invested through the downturn, and became NVIDIA's primary supplier for the H100/H200 era, while Micron also qualified ahead of Samsung on HBM3E. Samsung's fifth-generation HBM3E repeatedly failed NVIDIA's qualification tests, with reports citing heat and power-consumption issues; the company replaced its semiconductor chief with Jun Young-hyun in May 2024, and in October 2024 he issued a rare public apology for the "crisis" in the company's technical competitiveness after disappointing results and acknowledged delayed HBM3E sales to a major customer [5].
The turnaround came in stages. While NVIDIA qualification dragged on, Samsung shipped HBM3E to other buyers, including AMD's Instinct accelerator line, according to industry reports. In September 2025, roughly 18 months after the part was developed, Samsung's 12-layer HBM3E finally passed NVIDIA's tests, clearing it to supply all major HBM customers [6][7]. Samsung then moved aggressively on HBM4, pairing sixth-generation 1c DRAM with a 4nm logic base die from its own foundry, an integration competitors must source externally. Its HBM4 reportedly ranked first among suppliers in NVIDIA's qualification, achieving 11.7 Gbps pin speeds against a 10 Gbps requirement, and shipments to NVIDIA and AMD began in February 2026, with the parts slated for NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform [8][9]. Industry trackers still expect SK Hynix to take roughly two-thirds of NVIDIA's HBM4 allocation, with Samsung supplying most of the remainder [10].
Samsung also anchored itself in OpenAI's buildout: in October 2025 Samsung Electronics signed a letter of intent to serve as a strategic memory partner for the Stargate initiative, against OpenAI demand projected to reach up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, while affiliates Samsung SDS (data-center design and enterprise AI services) and Samsung C&T and Samsung Heavy Industries (floating data centers) joined the program and OpenAI explored Stargate data centers in South Korea [11][12].
| Date | HBM milestone |
|---|---|
| May 2024 | Chip chief replaced by Jun Young-hyun amid HBM3E qualification failures [5] |
| October 2024 | Public apology over AI-memory delays and weak results [5] |
| September 2025 | 12-layer HBM3E passes NVIDIA qualification [6][7] |
| October 2025 | Strategic memory partner for OpenAI's Stargate [11] |
| February 2026 | HBM4 mass shipments to NVIDIA and AMD begin at 11.7 Gbps [8][9] |
Samsung Foundry is the world's second-largest contract chipmaker but a distant runner-up to TSMC, and it entered 2025 with low utilization and persistent losses after yield struggles on advanced nodes pushed marquee customers toward its rival. The inflection came on July 28, 2025, when Samsung disclosed a 22.8 trillion won (about $16.5 billion) foundry contract running through the end of 2033; Elon Musk confirmed the customer was Tesla and said Samsung's new fab in Taylor, Texas would be dedicated to Tesla's next-generation AI6 chip, calling the strategic importance "hard to overstate" and noting Tesla would assist in maximizing manufacturing efficiency [13][14]. Samsung already manufactured Tesla's AI4 (Full Self-Driving) computer, with AI5 then planned for TSMC [14]. The relationship subsequently widened: Musk later confirmed that both AI5 and AI6 will be dual-sourced from Samsung and TSMC, with AI5 production starting in small volumes in late 2026 and high volume in 2027, and he remarked in October 2025 that the Taylor fab's equipment is slightly more advanced than TSMC's Arizona plant [15].
The Taylor site anchors Samsung's more than $37 billion Texas investment, supported by a finalized $4.745 billion direct award under the CHIPS and Science Act covering two leading-edge logic fabs and an R&D fab in Taylor plus an Austin expansion, with all facilities expected to be operational by 2030 [16]. Samsung began mass production of its first-generation 2nm process in Korea in late 2025, with the Exynos 2600 as lead product, and began shipping 4nm HBM4 base dies, while Taylor ramps 2nm production for customers including Tesla in the second half of 2026 [17][22].
Samsung has pushed into robotics as a designated growth engine. In December 2024 it exercised call options to raise its stake in Rainbow Robotics, the KAIST spinoff behind Korea's first bipedal humanoid HUBO, from 14.7 percent to 35 percent for about $181 million, becoming the largest shareholder and consolidating the firm as a subsidiary; regulators cleared the deal in early 2025 [18]. Samsung simultaneously established a Future Robotics Office reporting directly to the CEO, with Rainbow Robotics founder Oh Jun-ho leading the effort, aiming to combine Samsung's AI and manufacturing scale with Rainbow's humanoid platforms for eventual use in manufacturing and beyond [18][19].
Its consumer robot, Ballie, has had a rockier path. First shown as a rolling ball-shaped home companion at CES 2020 and revamped with a built-in projector at CES 2024, Ballie was slated, with Google Cloud's Gemini models on board, to launch in the United States and South Korea in summer 2025. The launch slipped repeatedly: by December 2025 Samsung confirmed the robot was still not ready, and Ballie was absent from CES 2026, where reporting indicated Samsung now describes it as an internal innovation platform rather than an imminent consumer product [20][21].
Samsung is the only company that simultaneously builds flagship AI consumer devices, manufactures the memory underpinning frontier accelerators, and operates a leading-edge logic foundry, making it a bellwether for both AI demand and AI supply. Its HBM3E saga became the industry's cautionary tale about how quickly leadership can be lost in AI-era memory, reshaping a decades-old hierarchy in which Samsung had been the unquestioned number one; its HBM4 comeback and record 2025-2026 earnings show how fast fortunes can reverse in a supply-constrained market [6][22][23]. The Tesla contract and the Taylor fab give Samsung Foundry its most credible path yet to relevance at the leading edge in the United States, while Galaxy AI's 400-million-device footprint makes Samsung one of the largest distribution channels for on-device and Gemini-powered AI in the world [4][13][16]. With the Rainbow Robotics consolidation and Stargate memory partnership, Samsung has positioned itself across nearly every layer of the AI buildout, from wafers to robots.