Samsung's foundry division has a new spring in its step. It already has a $16.5 billion chipmaking deal with Tesla, and is enjoying interest from others like AMD for 2nm chip production.
A new report indicates that Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee has made a low-key trip to Taiwan with a high-level delegation to meet MediaTek and potentially pivot it away from TSMC.
MediaTek could get preferential access to memory chips
The report claims that Lee arrived in Taiwan yesterday along with a high-level delegation. His schedule there also involved a meeting with Cai Lixing, MediaTek's CEO.
MediaTek has typically used TSMC for chip production, but it's not opposed to expanding the net. It already awarded a packaging contract to Intel for the inference variant of Google's 8th-gen TPU, while opting for TSMC's packaging services for the training-focused variant of the chip.
Samsung understandably sees an opportunity here. TSMC doesn't have enough 2nm spare capacity to go around, while Samsung has a lot more of it. It also has something that TSMC doesn't, a full suite of memory semiconductors.
It's claimed that Samsung may also offer MediaTek preferential access to memory chips for its upcoming Dimensity chipsets for mobile devices in a bid to sweeten the deal.
Memory chips are not just hard to come by these days but they're also very expensive. Samsung is in a unique position to offer this incentive, and it just might be enough to sway MediaTek.
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