Samsung is currently the only competitor to the Taiwanese market leader TSMC in the manufacture of computer chips using the 5 nm process. The US business journal Bloomberg has now published information according to which Samsung wants to catch up with TSMC by 2022. For this purpose, around 116 billion US dollars (approximately 98 billion euros) are to be invested in the production of chips over the next two years . A main goal up to 2022 is to be able to produce chips with a structure width of only 3 nm.

This would clearly exceed expectations that assumed a significantly longer period of time to catch up with TSMC. Should Samsung’s ambitious plans bear fruit, the two companies will probably continue to divide the SoC market beyond 5 nm among themselves in the foreseeable future.

TSMC could lose important customers in the long run due to this development, at least the company would have a harder time keeping existing customers like Apple and AMD. The Californian group alone currently accounts for around 8% of total sales at TSMC. Since its capacities in the production of 5 nm chips are already reaching their limits, Apple could soon be forced to use Samsung as a supplier. In addition, unlike TSMC, Samsung uses the new “Gate All Around” technology for 3 nm production. This should enable more structures on the chips and at the same time make them more energy efficient. Since 2019 Samsung has increased its share of its own chip production for third-party companies such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA and IBM from 18% to almost a third increase.