Samsung Foundry's Major Counterattack... Taylor Fab in US to Mass Produce 50,000 Wafers Monthly, Doubling the Plan Samsung Electronics' Foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) Division is launching a major counteroffensive in the global foundry market, currently dominated by Taiwan's TSMC, through aggressive investment to introduce the cutting-edge 2-nanometer (nm; 1nm = 1 billionth of a meter) process. It has been confirmed that all processes at the foundry fab currently under construction in Taylor, Texas, will be upgraded from the originally planned 4nm to 2nm, and the initial mass production volume has been increased to 50,000 wafers per month, exceeding double the original estimate. This is interpreted as a strategic move to secure technology and mass production capabilities equivalent to TSMC in the 2nm process, which will determine leadership in the global foundry market starting next year, and to preempt the "De-TSMC" demand from US big tech companies. According to the semiconductor industry on the 29th, the Samsung Taylor Fab will begin full-scale operational preparations starting with the first equipment move-in next March. It is reported that the plan is to start the first wafer input as early as the second quarter of next year. The most notable part is the "quantum jump" in the process. While it was expected that the Taylor Fab would first introduce the 4nm process, where securing initial yield (the ratio of defective-free products to total production) is easier, it is reported that equipment purchase orders (PO) were recently revised to proceed based on 2nm standards. The scale of mass production is also unconventional. While the semiconductor industry predicted the Taylor Fab's initial 2nm volume to be around 20,000 wafers per month, it has been drastically expanded to 50,000 wafers. This scale rivals the initial 2nm mass production volume TSMC is planning in Taiwan. Although Samsung Electronics declined to confirm, the industry perceives this as a "strategic choice to match TSMC's initial 2nm chip production scale." An industry insider analyzed, "It is a strategic move to encroach on the big tech volume concentrated on TSMC by realizing 'economies of scale' capable of handling large customer volumes at once in the US, going beyond simply preempting the process." The Taylor Fab is scheduled to have a production capacity of 100,000 wafers per month from 2027, when 2nm chip production begins in earnest. The reason the Taylor Fab is maximizing production capacity from the start of operations is due to 2nm chip orders secured from various big tech companies, including Tesla in the US. Samsung Electronics and Tesla signed a contract worth $16.5 billion (approx. 23 trillion KRW) last July for the next-generation autonomous driving chip, 'AI6'. It has also won orders for the next-generation Application Processor (AP) Exynos 2600 from Samsung's System LSI Division and mining ASICs from China's MicroBT and Canaan. The possibility of winning orders for Qualcomm's next-generation AP is also being predicted. However, since Samsung Electronics' Hwaseong Campus is currently the only place equipped with 2nm facilities, expanding production at the Taylor Fab is essential. The fact that Samsung Electronics introduced the new Gate-All-Around (GAA) method ahead of others in the previous generation 3nm process is also positive. GAA is a technology that minimizes current leakage and significantly improves performance and power efficiency compared to the existing FinFET design.