Meta (META.US) plans to place a $6.5 billion AI chip order with Samsung, changing the exclusive manufacturing status of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR.

After a month of rumors of "cooling cooperation", the cooperation between Meta (META.US) and Samsung Electronics in the field of customized AI chips has experienced a dramatic epic turnaround. According to the South Korean Seoul Economic Daily, Meta is in deep negotiations with Samsung Electronics' semiconductor foundry department (Samsung Foundry) and plans to sign a huge contract worth up to 10 trillion Korean won (approximately $6.54 billion) for the mass production of Meta's next-generation customized AI chips. Saying goodbye to exclusive outsourcing from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, Meta partners with Samsung System LSI Insiders revealed that the core of these negotiations is Meta's third-generation in-house AI training and inference accelerator (MTIA). Previously, Meta's first and second-generation MTIA chips were exclusively manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR (TSM.US). However, due to the ongoing severe worldwide shortage of advanced semiconductor foundry capacity, combined with Meta's aggressive development cycle of "iterating every 6 months", the massive workload has overwhelmed Meta's internal design team. To address this, Meta has established a joint development framework with Samsung Electronics' System LSI department responsible for logic chip design. Both parties will jointly design and have this next-generation AI accelerator based on ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) architecture manufactured by Samsung's semiconductor foundry. After the "pause storm", big players show their supplier strategies It is worth noting that this collaboration experienced ups and downs over the past month. On June 4th this year, local South Korean media revealed that Meta requested a "temporary halt" to the development project of custom chips with Samsung's System LSI department, almost simultaneously, news of a cooling of the project to develop an inference NPU (Network Processor Unit) in collaboration with OpenAI and Samsung also emerged. The withdrawal of two major customers at once once raised doubts about Samsung's advanced process outsourcing strategy. However, from the latest developments released today, it can be seen that the early project adjustments did not kill the deal, but rather evolved into a negotiation for a mass production contract worth up to $6.5 billion. Industry Observation: Silicon Valley sparks a trend of "de-NVIDIA Corporation" and "de-Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR" Analysts point out that if this $6.5 billion contract eventually materializes, it will be the most significant milestone victory for Samsung's semiconductor foundry business in recent years. Currently, Silicon Valley AI giants like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all vigorously implementing a "multi-vendor diversification" strategy. On one hand, they are all trying to reduce their absolute dependence on NVIDIA Corporation's general GPUs through in-house ASIC chips; on the other hand, these giants also urgently need to find a "Plan B" to divert large orders from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR. Recently, tech media The Information has just revealed that AI unicorn Anthropic is in close talks with Samsung and plans to use Samsung's 2nm (SF2P) process to produce its in-house chips. From OpenAI teaming up with Broadcom Inc. to develop chips, to Anthropic and Meta secretly meeting with Samsung, the global AI computing power supply chain in the second half of 2026 is evolving from "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR's dominance" towards a more complex game of giants.