Samsung Electronics and Broadcom have signed a memorandum of understanding worth more than $200 billion spanning memory chips, foundry manufacturing and advanced packaging for artificial intelligence semiconductors. The deal, announced on Friday at an AI summit in San Francisco, runs for five years through 2030 and covers some of the most critical layers of the AI chip supply chain. It is one of the largest semiconductor partnerships ever disclosed, though as an MOU it represents a statement of intent rather than a binding contract.

On the memory side, Samsung will supply Broadcom with next-generation high-bandwidth memory, including HBM4 and HBM4E chips, for use in Broadcom's AI accelerators. In foundry, Samsung will manufacture Broadcom products using two-nanometer and smaller process technologies at its campus in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. The collaboration also extends to advanced packaging that integrates memory and logic more tightly, a technique increasingly central to squeezing more performance out of AI silicon.

Broadcom designs custom AI chips for hyperscalers including Google, Meta and others that want silicon tailored to their specific workloads rather than buying off-the-shelf GPUs from Nvidia. The company extended its AI chip partnership with Meta through 2029 in April, and CEO Hock Tan recently said surging AI revenue has made organic growth more attractive than acquisitions. By diversifying manufacturing to Samsung, Broadcom gains supply chain resilience beyond its existing reliance on TSMC, which controls more than 90 percent of leading-edge chip production.

For Samsung, the deal addresses a persistent credibility gap in its foundry business, where its global market share has fallen to roughly seven percent while TSMC dominates. The company has struggled with yields on its two-nanometer process, but a $200 billion customer commitment from one of the industry's largest chip designers could change the calculus for investors who have questioned whether Samsung can compete at the leading edge. Samsung posted record quarterly operating profit of 89 trillion won in Q2, driven almost entirely by AI memory demand.

The signing took place alongside a broader package of semiconductor deals worth roughly $950 billion between South Korean and American companies, announced during an AI summit hosted by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. SK Hynix signed memory partnerships worth $750 billion with Nvidia and others, and Anthropic signed supply agreements with both Samsung and SK Hynix. The summit followed Seoul's $880 billion domestic investment plan unveiled in June, which committed Samsung and SK Hynix to building four new chip fabrication plants in the country's southwest.