According to Korea Times, industry sources indicate that Samsung plans to hold a semiconductor equipment installation ceremony at its Taylor, Texas manufacturing campus this Friday. Han Jin-man, President of Samsung Electronics Foundry Business, along with several key executives from the semiconductor supply chain, will attend the event.
To expand its foundry footprint in the United States, Samsung Electronics began constructing this wafer fabrication plant in Taylor, Texas, as early as November 2022, with an initial investment of $17 billion. The facility was originally scheduled to commence operations in October 2024, but delays in securing major customer orders forced a postponement of overall construction and production timelines.
However, in July 2025, after Samsung secured a massive $16.5 billion order from Tesla to manufacture AI5 and AI6 chips for its autonomous driving systems, preparation work at the Taylor plant accelerated significantly. To meet large-scale mass production demand, Samsung has not only continued to dispatch engineers specializing in advanced process technologies to the Taylor site but also recently expanded staffing by deploying dedicated high-volume manufacturing teams to the facility.
Notably, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X on April 15, congratulating Tesla’s AI chip design team on successfully completing the design finalization of the AI5 chip. In the post, Musk also specifically thanked TSMC and Samsung for their strong support in bringing the chip to mass production.
A screenshot of Musk’s post shows the Tesla AI5 prototype chip marked with “KR 2613” in the lower-right section, indicating the chip was manufactured in South Korea in the 13th week of 2026.
Musk also revealed that Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chip will integrate LPDDR memory. This detail suggests that Samsung’s strengths as an advanced integrated chip manufacturer, particularly in memory chips, likely played a key role in Musk’s decision to select Samsung as a partner.
In addition to producing advanced AI chips for Tesla, Samsung Electronics is actively pursuing other major customers. For instance, it plans to manufacture image sensors for Apple’s iPhone at its Austin, Texas wafer facility. Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed at last month’s GTC 2026 conference that Samsung Electronics is currently assisting in the production of the next-generation Groq 3 Language Processing Unit (LPU) inference chips.
The report emphasized that the string of new order wins has significantly boosted Samsung’s financial outlook. Samsung Securities stated that the operating loss of Samsung Electronics’ foundry business is expected to narrow sharply to 376.9 billion KRW in the first quarter of 2026, a marked improvement from the massive 1.9 trillion KRW loss recorded in the same period of 2026.Going forward, the division’s capacity utilization rate is projected to exceed 80%. Supported by ongoing upward trends in wafer prices, Samsung’s foundry business is on track to return to quarterly profitability as early as the third quarter of 2026.
(Reprinted from https://news.eccn.com/）