CaiLian Press, August 19 (Edited by Zhao Hao) - The latest news reveals that Samsung Electronics has increased the prices of some new orders for advanced process wafer foundry services by up to 15%.
According to informed sources, Samsung raised the prices of chips produced using the 4-nanometer process, known as the SF4 process, in July, with an increase of 10% to 15% compared to the previous month.
Two informed sources indicated that Samsung was unable to fulfill all orders, as the company needed to allocate production capacity for its US customers, while also having to reserve a portion of its capacity for its own chip production.
A person familiar with Samsung's operations said that the SF4 production line at Samsung's Pyeongtaek factory in South Korea has been operating at full capacity since the end of last year.
This production line produces logic chips for customers including Qualcomm, as well as base dies for Samsung's multi-layer high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips.
In addition, the price of Samsung's 5-nanometer SF5 process wafers has increased by 10% to 15%, and the price of older 8-nanometer process wafers has increased by nearly 10%.
Samsung's bargaining power has increased
According to analysis, this price increase marks a turnaround for Samsung's wafer foundry business, which has been operating at a loss since 2022, according to industry estimates.
With the surge in demand for AI chips, global chip manufacturing capacity is becoming increasingly tight, and this market has long been dominated by TSMC.
Despite Samsung's overall profits hitting a record high, driven by the soaring prices of memory chips needed for AI systems, the company's foundry division has been struggling to narrow the gap with TSMC.
According to research firm Counterpoint, in the first quarter of 2026, Samsung accounted for 7% of global wafer foundry revenue, while TSMC's share exceeded 70%.
However, the demand for AI chips has already occupied most of TSMC's advanced manufacturing capacity. As TSMC's capacity approaches saturation, Samsung has more room to raise prices.
Samsung expects that advanced processes will account for more than half of its foundry revenue this year, while AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications will contribute over 30%, up from 15% to 20% by the end of 2025.
"As TSMC faces tight capacity and increases prices, customers are starting to turn to competitors like Samsung and Intel, which is prompting Samsung to raise its prices as well," said Lee Min-hee, an analyst at BNK Investment & Securities in Seoul
He said: "If Samsung continues to raise prices from now on, its foundry business could become profitable as early as next year, earlier than previously expected."
Last month, Samsung stated that its foundry business is expected to resume profitability in the near future, driven by increased factory capacity utilization, improved production yields, and firming prices.
Samsung also stated at the time that sales growth from major customers, coupled with demand for HBM basic die, would drive the revenue of its foundry business to grow by more than double-digit percentage in the second half of the year compared to the same period last year.
Improvements in production yield have also helped Samsung win more customers. Last year, Tesla and Apple each announced chip manufacturing agreements with Samsung, and Broadcom also reached an AI chip production agreement with Samsung last month.
In March this year, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated that Samsung would produce a new generation of AI inference processors for NVIDIA. According to another source, Google is also in talks with Samsung regarding the production of chips using the SF4 process.