Corporate Governance ReportOne possibility is readying its foundry business to build GPUs. Samsung is the world's second-largest foundry business by revenue, behind TSMC. With demand for AI accelerators currently strong and Samsung seeking to grow its foundry business, investing in tooling to build GPUs seems an obvious step. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has often praised TSMC's capabilities, especially as GPUs and associated products have very long supply chains.
Building its own GPUs for mobile devices is another possibility. Samsung already bakes GPUs into its Exynos SoCs but its most recent model 2400 includes an Xclipse 940 GPU built on AMD's RDNA 3 architecture. The Korean giant uses Exynos silicon in many products, but famously mixes its own silicon and Qualcomm's across its range of flagship Galaxy S devices.
Apple's long dominance of the smartphone industry demonstrates that controlling more of a device's hardware and software stack can pay off. Samsung is all-in on Android, so likely won't control the OS in the same way Apple does. But if the Chaebol builds more of the silicon in its devices, it would have a chance to further tailor products to its desires – perhaps enhancing their on-device AI capabilities and/or making them more impressive gaming machines.
Then there's the fact that high-end GPUs are hard to build, as Intel has discovered. Samsung would also know that if even Intel – which has decades of experience building hardware and software ecosystems – finds GPUs a tough market, its own efforts would face many obstacles.