Recently, the Korean media reported that an industry source revealed that Samsung's new factory in Tyler, Texas, will use a 4nm chip process to produce Exynos application processors (AP) for Galaxy smartphones. Industry sources believe that Samsung Electronics has encountered difficulties in securing external customers, and therefore decided to undertake its own orders.

In August, Samsung Electronics announced that it would invest $17 billion in a new semiconductor plant in Tyler, Texas. This factory is also Samsung's second chip foundry in the United States and the second chip foundry in Texas. The first plant was located in Austin, Texas, while the new Tyler plant is located 25 kilometres northeast of the Austin plant.

Samsung's Tyler plant is currently under construction and is targeted for completion this year, and is expected to begin mass production of chips using 4nm-scale process technology in the US by the end of 2024, ahead of TSMC's Fab 21 plant in Arizona. 

According to The Korea Herald, recently Samsung co-CEO Kyung Kye-hyun said in a special lecture at Seoul National University that the Samsung foundry is optimistic about its position in the semiconductor market and is ready to challenge TSMC more aggressively than ever before.

The Korea Herald reports that if all goes according to plan, Samsung's new factories for 4nm-scale process technologies (SF4E, SF4, SF4P, SF4X and SF4A) will begin high-volume production by the end of 2024. While this will hardly have an immediate impact on the foundry market, Samsung can say it beat TSMC to the punch with its US-based 4nm process.

Samsung Electronics' Tyler, Texas facility has reportedly identified its first customer, fabless semiconductor designer Groq, which has announced that it will build its next generation of semiconductors using the 4nm process at Samsung Electronics' U.S. facility. Groq is the first company to publicly announce that it will produce chips at Samsung Electronics' Tyler facility.

While the company is not as well known as fabless vendors such as Qualcomm and Nvidia, they are already recognised in the field of AI chips and accelerators.Founded in 2016 in Silicon Valley, Groq's founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, is a former engineer at Google, and a number of the company's employees have experience developing AI semiconductors during their time at Google. They specialise in developing chips and accelerators for reasoning that are part of AI.

In the global semiconductor space, Groq, along with companies such as TensTorrent and Cerebras, are considered to be the future leaders in AI semiconductors.In April 2021, Groq received a $300 million investment from a number of leading venture capital firms.

However, despite the fact that Samsung Electronics' Tyler, Texas plant has orders coming in, it still doesn't seem to be able to get enough customers to support & consume the plant's future capacity. To this end, Samsung Electronics has decided to place orders internally to match the production plan of the Taylor factory.

It is reported that the products produced at Samsung's Taylor factory will be integrated into the Samsung Galaxy S25 series, which is scheduled to be released in early 2025. The specific products that will be integrated into the Galaxy S25 series as well as the sales regions where the APs produced at Samsung's Taylor factory will be sold are still unknown.The 4nm process production will also be carried out at the domestic campus in Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.

In August 2022, the U.S. launched a $50 billion-plus subsidy policy for the semiconductor industry, attracting global chip makers to the U.S. to build factories. Samsung's Tyler plant is also likely to receive certain project subsidies, while mobile phone products produced locally in the US can receive relevant tax incentives. Therefore, Samsung is likely to Taylor factory AP for sales in the United States on the Galaxy smartphone. Therefore, the future of Samsung Taylor factory's big customers may be Samsung Electronics itself.

However, it is worth mentioning that Samsung Electronics is ambitious in the chip foundry business, and intends to further catch up or even catch up with TSMC.

TrendForce data show that Samsung foundry in the foundry chip manufacturing market market share from the first quarter of 9.9% soared to 11.7% in the second quarter of 2023, revenues reached 3.234 billion U.S. dollars, higher than the first quarter of 2.757 billion U.S. dollars. While TSMC maintained its dominance, its market share fell to 56.4 per cent on revenue of $15.656 billion.