A major Korean newspaper reports that Intel and Samsung will join forces to fight TSMC.

TSMC is the leader in manufacturing high-end chips and processors. Samsung is the second largest manufacturer, and Intel has the smallest impact in the industry. It's not surprising to learn that a Korean newspaper has reported that Intel and Samsung are planning to create a foundry alliance to gain a foothold in the chip market.

The publication in question, Maeil Business Newspaper is a local publication called MK. Its report that Intel reached out to Samsung via Trendforce to arrange a meeting for a team-up to discuss foundries has some weight as both companies are struggling.

Intel's foundry service is losing a lot of money, and plans to expand outside the US to make chips have been affected by cost-cutting due to the downturn in company finances. Intel's order books are pretty empty at the moment. It makes its own chips, and has some other contracts.

Samsung is in a much better position. Samsung manufactures RAM, NAND flash memory, and processors for its phones, but has hundreds of clients for its foundry service. Samsung's foundry services are far behind the thousands of TSMC. Trendforce reports that TSMC holds 62% of the market share for foundries, while Samsung has only 11%.

Samsung is a distant second, but it makes more chips than Intel, so this raises an obvious question: What would be the benefits of a chip-making partnership with Intel?

Team Blue can bring two key technologies to the table: Foveros, and PowerVia. Intel uses the former in its Meteor processors and Arrow Lake processors, which allows all the tiles to be mounted into a single package. This is crucial to Intel's ability to compete with AMD and its chiplet technology.

PowerVia, a production method, helps to reduce energy consumption and heat generation. Originally, it was planned to be introduced along with Arrow Lake. However, Intel decided to use TSMC for all of the tiles.

Both companies have production and packing facilities around the globe. At a time when US and EU tighten restrictions on exporting chip to certain countries, a large local presence makes it easier for them to combat these limitations.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that the average PC gamer would benefit from an alliance. Samsung made RAM and SSDs exclusively until recently, but the last major component of a PC was the GPU for Nvidia's RTX 30 series graphics cards. AMD and Nvidia will likely stick with TSMC in the near future. Intel could well use Samsung to manufacture certain tiles of Ultra Core processors, but when this might happen is unknown.

is sure that Intel and Samsung will do everything they can to beat TSMC in its own game. There are billions in revenue at stake, especially in the AI industry, and market rivalries are meaningless when there is so much money to be made.