Samsung struggled to win a meaningful number of orders from major chip designers for its 3nm process. TSMC ran away with the majority of them, as its 3nm process was far more stable and didn't suffer from the same yield issues that have caused Samsung Foundry to lose deals worth billions of dollars.

The Korean giant has since shifted its focus towards improving competitiveness on the 2nm process. While there are promising signs, AMD is already declaring TSMC as the leader in 2nm chipmaking, even though it doesn't rule out working with Samsung.

AMD announced a few weeks ago that it's the first foundry customer to utilize TSMC's 2nm process. AMD CEO Lisa Su personally visited TSMC's Arizona fab to announce this milestone. AMD's upcoming EPYC server processors, codenamed Venice, will be manufactured on this process technology and launched in 2026.

A Senior Vice President at AMD has revealed in an interview that “TSMC is the leader in the 2nm process, so we are focusing on developing and mass producing it with the highest efficiency per watt and semiconductor performance.” This makes it clear that AMD is entirely focused on bringing its 2nm server chips to market with TSMC.

TSMC can be a busy place, though, as its capacity is highly sought after from top chip designers, including NVIDIA, Apple, Qualcomm, and others. This gives TSMC a lot more pricing power because it doesn't quite have a true rival.

Samsung has made considerable progress with its 2nm process and the SF2 and SF1.4 underlying nodes, leading to recent speculation that Qualcomm may have a Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 variant manufactured by Samsung Foundry.

Despite AMD's high praise for TSMC, it has confirmed that the company routinely talks with suppliers “who can offer the best services for our customers.” Clearly there's no exclusivity deal with TSMC for AMD's 2nm chips, so Samsung would be the next logical supplier if AMD can't secure enough capacity at TSMC or whether economical or geopolitical factors force it to have another chipmaker in the mix.