The past few years have been a bit of a struggle for Exynos chips. Low-yield issues with Samsung Foundry wafers have led to the loss of big customers. The demand for chip manufacturing at Samsung factories has been poor for some time now, with only Exynos SoCs and a few third-party contracts using them.
Poor demand prompts Samsung to shut down chip factories, including some Exynos makers
Many of Samsung Foundry’s semiconductor factories were still active but not actually producing products. So, according to South Korean media Chosung, the company has decided to suspend operations at 30% of its 4nm, 5nm, and 7nm chip fabs. This is not a permanent shutdown, but a temporary one. In fact, the equipment will continue to receive power, but in a low-consumption mode to save electricity-related costs.
According to the report, the percentage of “semi-off” fabs will increase to 50% by the end of this year. Among the mentioned wafers, only the 4nm one remains permanently active, manufacturing the Exynos 2400 and some Snapdragon S chips. However, third-party demand is so low that it is far from occupying the full wafer capacity.
Samsung still hopes to improve the performance of its 3nm wafers
Currently, Samsung Foundry is struggling with the low yield of its 3nm GAA wafers. The company even had to ditch the Exynos 2500 from the Galaxy S25 series. Reports claim that they are still working on trying to improve the performance of its 3nm wafers in order to implement the Exynos 2500 in the foldable Galaxy devices of 2025.
On the bright side, the situation looks better for Samsung’s 2nm process. The South Korean giant hopes to offer competitive factories that will attract the attention of big customers. Even Qualcomm has opened the door to working with Samsung again for flagship Snapdragon chips in the near future.
Things got complicated for Samsung Foundry in 2021
Samsung Foundry’s “nightmare” began in 2021 with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Qualcomm had designed the SoC with high expectations, for which it even debuted a name change. However, Samsung Foundry 4nm wafers “ruined it,” delivering chips with high power consumption and poor thermal management. Low factory yield was also an issue back then, with the percentage of usable chips produced being far from ideal.
Qualcomm acted quickly to remedy things by moving chip production to TSMC for the second half of the year. The company used the same design but slightly increased the CPU clock speeds. The result was the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, one of the best chips in the company’s history. At the time, Samsung Foundry was widely blamed as the source of the problems with the original chip.
In fact, the Snapdragon 888, the predecessor of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, was already showing some signs that something was not quite right. While the chip did not exhibit the latter’s severe problems, it already presented worse thermal control and energy efficiency than usual. Nvidia, another big player in the tech industry, also switched from Samsung to TSMC. In this way, Samsung suddenly lost its main customers for the time.
