Qualcomm doubled down on Samsung at a Seoul event and Chris Patrick, the company’s mobile head, said all the right things about AI. The partnership’s been solid since CDMA, on through Periscope Zoom and live translation.

But when the topic shifted to Samsung’s 2nm foundry, Patrick went quiet. “There is nothing specific to share today,” he said.

He wrapped it with talk about working with multiple partners for “optimal performance, cost, and supply stability,” which is a polite way of reminding everyone that Qualcomm bolted from Samsung’s foundry to TSMC years ago.

Qualcomm shifted all its sub-4nm orders to TSMC in the second half of 2022. Samsung became the first to mass-produce 3nm chips in 2023, but struggled with stable yields.

It’s been two and a half years since, and Samsung’s still trying to prove it can deliver without lighting money on fire, and now, the company is staking everything on 2nm.

The Seoul event surfaced Qualcomm’s next-gen Snapdragon X2 platform. The X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme pack serious upgrades.

• CPU single-thread performance jumps 39 percent over the prior gen, multi-thread performance goes up 50 percent, GPU performance more than doubles, and the Hexagon NPU improves by 78 percent.

Nitin Kumar, Qualcomm’s VP of product management, framed on-device AI as transformative. “AI is not just a feature, but a factor that transforms the user interface itself,” he said.

The company’s betting AI reshapes how devices sense and respond across categories: smartphones, glasses, cars, robotics. It also means Qualcomm needs reliable foundry partners who can actually deliver the silicon to support this roadmap at scale.

TSMC has already locked in the market by pulling its existing 3nm customers into 2nm, and its 2nm customer list reportedly includes Nvidia, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

There are reports claiming Qualcomm is planning to shift to Samsung Foundry for its 2nm chip business from TSMC due to high costs and limited capacity, but nothing has been confirmed.

The post Samsung is Qualcomm’s ‘key partner’ for AI chips appeared first on Sammy Fans.

A report by Counterpoint Research last month revealed that memory prices have jumped between 80% and 90% since the first quarter of 2026, compared with the end of last year. This includes everything from DRAM to NAND and even HBM, all of which are now sitting at record highs.

And guess what? All of these costs will eventually be passed down to consumers. According to industry tipster Digital Chat Station (DCS), the combined cost of 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB UFS 4.1 storage has now surpassed the price of a flagship processor like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

For years, chipsets have been the most expensive component in a high-end phone. Now, memory and storage are catching up, if not overtaking them.

There’s also no clear sign of relief. According to DCS, the same memory-and-storage configuration is expected to exceed 2,300 yuan by the second quarter. This will add even more pressure on manufacturers already operating on tight margins.

In fact, Meizu has reportedly paused its in-house hardware development for new phones and is exploring partnerships instead. Meanwhile, companies across the board have begun adjusting prices. OnePlus and Oppo, for example, have recently increased smartphone prices in China.

For consumers, this means higher prices are becoming harder to avoid, even outside the premium segment. Both budget and mid-range phones are now being pulled into the same cost pressures.

The only positive

The one silver lining, according to Digital Chat Station, is that newer phones are at least getting more capable hardware. As component costs rise, manufacturers appear to be compensating by upgrading specifications. delivering the hardware users expect and, in some cases, adding new features along the way.

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