Samsung has raised prices for some of its advanced contract chipmaking by as much as 15 percent for new orders, according to a Reuters report. Two people familiar with the matter said the increases follow a surge in demand for AI chips. That demand is tightening capacity in a business TSMC has long dominated.

The rises took effect in July and centre on Samsung’s 4-nanometre process, known as SF4, the sources said. Customers for SF4 chips in China and the United States saw increases of 10 to 15 percent from the previous month. Customers in Taiwan, TSMC’s home, faced smaller rises of 5 to 10 percent. Prices for Samsung’s 5-nanometre SF5 wafers rose 10 to 15 percent. Its older 8-nanometre work went up by nearly 10 percent.

A foundry makes chips to other companies’ designs. The process node, measured in nanometres, is a rough guide to how advanced it is. Smaller numbers mean newer, denser chips. SF4 is Samsung’s workhorse advanced node, and the sort of process AI chip designers compete for.

Demand from Chinese customers has been especially strong, the sources said. Samsung has not been able to fill every order. It has to serve US customers and hold back some capacity for its own chip production. Chinese customers are among those accepting the steepest rises.

Why China is paying more

That willingness reflects a squeeze created by trade policy. US curbs on exports of advanced chipmaking equipment to China have pushed local firms towards foreign foundries such as Samsung. With fewer options at the leading edge, they have less room to resist a price rise. Chinese customers are among those accepting the steepest increases, one source said, even as they pay more than buyers elsewhere.

Samsung declined to comment, saying it does not discuss operational matters. The figures come from the two people Reuters spoke to, who asked not to be named because the pricing is commercially sensitive.

The increases mark a turn for a foundry business that has lost money since 2022, according to industry estimates. The division has struggled to close the gap with TSMC. That is despite record profits for Samsung as a whole. Those came from soaring prices for the memory chips used in AI systems.

The two businesses have pulled in opposite directions. Samsung is the world’s biggest memory maker, and the AI boom has sent memory prices sharply higher. Its foundry, which competes for the contract-manufacturing work TSMC leads, has been the weak spot. A price rise there is a sign the gap may be starting to close.

Leaning on TSMC’s full order book

Samsung made 7 percent of global foundry revenue in the first quarter of 2026, the research firm Counterpoint said. TSMC made more than 70 percent. But AI demand has booked up much of TSMC’s leading-edge capacity, which gives Samsung more room to charge more.

That is a notable shift. For years, Samsung’s foundry has been the distant number two. It had to compete on price to win any work TSMC could not or would not take. A market where customers come to Samsung because TSMC is full, and accept higher prices to do so, is the opposite of that dynamic.

Lee Min-hee, an analyst at BNK Investment & Securities, tied the move to that shift. “As TSMC faces tight capacity and raises prices, customers are shifting to rivals such as Samsung and Intel, prompting Samsung to raise its prices as well.”

He also sees a path to profit. If Samsung keeps raising prices, Lee said, its foundry business could turn profitable as early as next year, sooner than previously expected.

Samsung expects advanced processes to make up more than half of its foundry revenue this year. It expects AI and high-performance computing to account for more than 30 percent, up from 15 to 20 percent in late 2025.

A production line running flat out

Samsung’s SF4 line sits at its Pyeongtaek plant in South Korea. It has run at full capacity since late last year, a person familiar with its operations said. The line makes logic chips for customers including Qualcomm, the person said. It also produces the base dies used in Samsung’s own high-bandwidth memory chips, the stacked components that feed data to AI processors.

The company said in July that it expected the foundry unit to return to profit soon, helped by higher factory use, better yields and firmer pricing. Rising sales to large US and Chinese customers, along with demand for HBM base dies, should lift foundry revenue in the second half by more than a double-digit percentage from a year earlier, it said.

Better yields have also helped Samsung win work. Tesla and Apple unveiled chipmaking deals with the company last year. Samsung signed an AI-chip production deal with Broadcom in July, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said in March that Samsung would make his company’s new AI inference processor. Google is also in talks with Samsung about making chips on SF4, one of the sources said. Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Taken together, the deals point to a broadening customer base beyond Samsung’s traditional mobile-chip work. Winning orders from the biggest AI-chip designers is what would let Samsung run its lines full and hold its new prices. The company has said better factory use and yields are central to its return to profit.

For a division that has trailed TSMC for years, the pricing power is new. Whether it lasts will depend on how long AI demand keeps the industry’s leading foundries full.

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