As the world's leading wafer foundry, TSMC occupies a key strategic position in advanced manufacturing processes due to its leading technology. Global technology giants Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are all TSMC's major customers. However, recent Korean media reports revealed that, Due to the high price of TSMC's 2nm chips and the current limited production capacity, Apple's original plan to adopt them has been postponed to 2026. Huida and Qualcomm have begun to consider using 2nm chips produced by Samsung.
According to foreign media sammobile, Japan's Rapidus, South Korea's Samsung and TSMC are currently trying to mass-produce semiconductor chips using the 2nm process. TSMC is temporarily in the leading position in this competition, with a yield rate of 60%, and is conducting process testing with its customers, including Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, which are all major customers of TSMC.
However, according to a report by Chosun Ilbo, Apple has postponed its 2-nanometer chip production schedule to 2026 due to TSMC’s high costs.
Not only that, the report quoted an analysis report as pointing out that Apple, Qualcomm, and Nvidia are considered to be the first manufacturers to adopt TSMC's 2-nanometer chips. However, TSMC's 2-nanometer chip production capacity is extremely limited. Although it is actively expanding production, every month in the future Production volume will be increased from the current 10,000 wafers to 80,000 wafers, but this may not be achieved until 2026 at the earliest.
Due to the high price and low quantity, Nvidia and Qualcomm are rumored to be considering using Samsung's 2nm process for testing. Although Samsung has obtained orders from fabless chip companies (such as Preferred Networks, referred to as PFN), it still needs large customers such as Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, and Qualcomm to have a chance to profit from 2nm.
In addition, Nvidia and Qualcomm do not want to rely too much on TSMC, because then they will lose negotiating power and have to pay TSMC's extremely high costs. Therefore, these companies hope to diversify their supply chains and hand over at least part of the chip manufacturing to Samsung's 2nm process.
However, the performance of Samsung's advanced process is not ideal. In the past, when it produced 4nm chips for Qualcomm, it encountered overheating and performance bottleneck problems. In the future, it was unable to convert any top customers because it was able to overcome huge obstacles. 3nm process orders. The report pointed out that this may be Samsung's last chance to succeed.
As the prices of DRAM and NAND have plummeted, and HBM3E high-bandwidth memory has not yet received Nvidia certification, the situation may get worse if Samsung's 2nm process fails to attract enough customers.
