SAMSUNG Raises Advanced Foundry Prices by Up to 15 Percent as AI Demand Fills Its 4nm Lines

SAMSUNG has raised prices on some of its advanced contract chipmaking by as much as 15 percent for new orders. The increases took effect in July and centre on SF4, the company's 4-nanometre process. With AI chip demand filling leading-edge capacity, the foundry business that has long trailed TSMC is regaining pricing power.

The increases centre on the 4nm generation

The size of the rise depends on where the customer sits and which process it uses. SF4 customers in China and the United States saw increases of 10 to 15 percent from the previous month, while customers in Taiwan, TSMC's home market, faced smaller rises of 5 to 10 percent. Wafers on the 5-nanometre SF5 node went up 10 to 15 percent, and older 8-nanometre work rose by close to 10 percent.

A foundry manufactures chips designed by other companies. The process node, given in nanometres, is a rough guide to how advanced a line is: smaller numbers mean newer processes that pack transistors more densely. SF4 is SAMSUNG's workhorse advanced node and exactly the kind of capacity AI chip designers compete for.

SAMSUNG itself has not confirmed the change, saying it does not discuss operational matters. The figures come from two people familiar with the terms. Because pricing is commercially sensitive, both spoke on condition of anonymity.

Chinese customers are accepting the steepest increases

What stands out is the gap between regions. Demand from Chinese customers has been especially strong, and SAMSUNG has not been able to fill every order. It also has to serve US customers and hold back capacity for its own chip production.

Those Chinese customers are absorbing the largest increases, and trade policy explains why. US curbs on exports of advanced chipmaking equipment to China have made leading-edge production at home harder, pushing local design firms towards foreign foundries such as SAMSUNG. With fewer options at the leading edge, there is less room to push back on price. They end up paying more per wafer than buyers elsewhere and still secure the capacity.

TSMC is full, so the number two gets its turn

According to research firm Counterpoint, SAMSUNG accounted for 7 percent of global foundry revenue in the first quarter of 2026, against more than 70 percent for TSMC. On those numbers alone, the balance of power has not shifted.

The increases stick anyway because AI demand has booked up most of TSMC's leading-edge lines. For years SAMSUNG competed on price for the work TSMC could not or would not take. Customers now arrive because TSMC is full, and they accept a higher price to get in. That is the opposite of the old dynamic.

Lee Min-hee, an analyst at BNK Investment and Securities, describes the chain of events this way: as TSMC runs into tight capacity and raises prices, customers shift to rivals such as SAMSUNG and Intel, which in turn lets SAMSUNG raise its own prices. He believes that if the company keeps lifting prices, its foundry business could turn profitable as early as next year, sooner than previously expected.

The Pyeongtaek line has run flat out since late last year

The move matters more once you look at SAMSUNG's internal situation. Industry estimates put the foundry division in the red since 2022. The company as a whole has been posting record profits on surging prices for AI memory, while contract manufacturing remained the weak spot. The world's largest memory maker and a distant number two foundry have been pulling in opposite directions.

The SF4 line sits at the Pyeongtaek plant in South Korea and has run at full capacity since late last year, according to a person familiar with its operations. It makes logic chips for customers including Qualcomm, alongside the base dies used in SAMSUNG's own high-bandwidth memory. A base die is the foundation of a stacked memory package, feeding data to AI processors. The memory boom is therefore flowing straight into foundry utilisation.

The customer list is widening too. Better yields helped bring in chipmaking deals with Tesla and Apple last year, and in July SAMSUNG agreed to produce AI chips for Broadcom. NVIDIA's Jensen Huang said in March that SAMSUNG would manufacture his company's new AI inference processor, and Google is reported to be in talks about production on SF4. The mix is moving well beyond SAMSUNG's traditional mobile-chip work.

In July the company said it expected the foundry unit to return to profit soon, helped by higher factory use, better yields and firmer pricing. Rising sales to large US and Chinese customers, together with demand for HBM base dies, should lift second-half foundry revenue by more than a double-digit percentage from a year earlier. Advanced processes are expected to account for more than half of foundry revenue this year, with AI and high-performance computing above 30 percent, up from 15 to 20 percent in late 2025.

Summary

SAMSUNG's advanced foundry price rise is less a routine adjustment than a symptom of a supply and demand balance in which TSMC no longer absorbs everything. As long as export controls push Chinese buyers to pay premium rates and TSMC's full order book sends customers down the road, that pricing power holds. The flip side is that SAMSUNG's path back to profit depends heavily on AI demand continuing to fill leading-edge lines. Judging whether a division that lost money for years has truly recovered will take until next year's results.