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Samsung is shipping imperfect 2nm chips on purpose
Samsung is sitting at roughly 55% yield on its 2nm process. Nearly half of every wafer it produces gets thrown in the bin. Samsung is deliberately pushing 2nm chips out the door at this yield because it has no better option right now.
Until the back half of last year, Samsung’s 2nm yields were stuck in the 20% range. Getting from 20% to 55% in under twelve months is actually a serious technical achievement.
The production experience driving that improvement came largely from Bitcoin mining chip orders, companies like Canaan and MicroBT feeding Samsung’s lines with enough volume to build process memory.
When you fold in binning losses and packaging, the share of chips that can actually generate profit drops closer to 40%. It is the number that explains why Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD haven’t moved their orders.
Qualcomm, which seemed close to committing, has been drifting back toward TSMC for the same reason. TSMC is reportedly running its own 2nm process at somewhere between 60% and 70% yield, as reported by Busan.
Samsung is planning mass production this year for Tesla’s AI6 autonomous driving chip. When those wafers start running at volume, Samsung’s yield at that moment will determine whether the business case holds together or bleeds out.
What Samsung needs isn’t just higher yields. It needs a flagship client willing to publicly trust the process. Apple would change everything overnight and NVIDIA would change the conversation entirely. But those companies aren’t going to sign until the numbers move.
Half the chips are garbage, the good clients are watching from a distance, and the company’s answer is to keep shipping anyway.
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