Industry chatter on 7 December said Samsung Electronics Foundry has agreed to build omni-processing unit chips for US AI startup Tsavorite Scalable Intelligence using its 4-nanometer process. The OPU bundles a CPU, GPU and memory into a single slab of silicon and is pitched as a next-generation AI workhorse.

Pre-orders for the job are thought to top $100 million, which is roughly €94 million, a tidy sum for a process node that has given Samsung more headaches than wins. The outfit had struggled to tame its four-nano yield and rarely found a profitable path with bleeding-edge production, although insiders claim the yield has now climbed to between 60 and 70 per cent, bringing it back into contention. The company picked up another order in October for Tesla’s AI5 autonomous driving chip.

The comeback may get a shove next year when Samsung’s memory division begins mass production of sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory known as HBM4. The foundry is set to produce the base die for HBM4 on the same four nanolines, which should improve its turnaround.

Samsung’s Exynos 2600 mobile processor, destined for the Galaxy S26 launch early next year, will also be built exclusively at its foundry, giving the unit another anchor customer as it tries to rebuild its reputation.