In the revised IDM 2.0 strategy, Intel adjusted its position in internal and outsourced silicon manufacturing. In addition to the good cooperation results with TSMC (although the launch speed of arc alchemist graphics card is relatively slow), Intel seems to have a longer-term development plan, not just TSMC as the chip source of its product portfolio.
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, recently visited Seoul, the capital of South Korea. According to the Korean Herald, Gelsinger met with several Samsung executives, including Lee Jae Yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, Kyung Kye Hyun, CO CEO and head of chip business, and Roh Tae moon, head of Samsung mobile.
This meeting was enough to trigger discussion on deepening cooperation between the two companies. Although the report source did not provide any information or operational intelligence about the meeting, Samsung is still one of the major semiconductor manufacturers alongside Intel and TSMC, and has a particularly strong product portfolio in memory related technologies.
Considering Samsung's declining competitiveness in the latest manufacturing process, Intel may want to gain greater initiative in the negotiations. After the result of Samsung's 4nm node was not so good, it was reported that the output trajectory of the node had been in trouble. Samsung saw Qualcomm transfer the production of its snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to its competitor TSMC.
Similarly, it is reported that NVIDIA, another customer of Samsung, has chosen the manufacturing process of TSMC's next generation RTX 4000 series GPU, which may make Samsung in urgent need of customers who can meet its manufacturing capacity.