Samsung reportedly rejected joint-foundry proposal from Nvidia in 2018

Back in 2018, Nvidia underwent a big shift towards AI, a bet that has massively paid off in recent years, cementing the company’s position at the top of the tech industry. As it turns out, Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, may have wanted to bring Samsung along for the ride with a series of rejected proposals.

According to a new report from South Korean news outlet, MK, and translated by Jukan, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, held a secret meeting with Samsung in 2018. Huang proposed that Nvidia and Samsung enter joint endeavours to push HBM, Foundry services and CUDA. The deal would have seen Nvidia and Samsung jointly developing foundry technologies beyond 8nm, which was Samsung’s most advanced process technology at the time and was used on the first GeForce RTX graphics chips.

The report claims that due to the ‘political environment’ at the time, Samsung did not take Nvidia up on the offer. Samsung still has a good place in Foundry, but TSMC is the dominant force and has eaten up most of the major clientele, like Nvidia, AMD and Apple – even Intel uses TSMC foundry services from time to time.

Nobody at Nvidia or Samsung have confirmed that these discussions took place officially, but if this report is accurate, then there is a fascinating story to be told here. With the benefit of hindsight, we can look at this now and wonder why on earth Samsung would reject a deeper partnership with Nvidia. However, at the time, Samsung was undergoing scrutiny in its home country of South Korea, as the company’s Vice Chairman at the time, Lee Jae-yong, was undergoing a legal battle the time. It is speculated that this is the negative ‘political environment’ that held Samsung back from pursuing talks further.

KitGuru Says: If Nvidia and Samsung had gone into a joint foundry endeavour, do you think Samsung would have taken TSMC’s top place?

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