Samsung shared some news during its Q2 2021 earnings call this week that sounded very positive for future chip output but potentially awful for enthusiasts’ wallets. As noted by executive VP of investor relations Ben Suh, Samsung will be increasing the prices of its semiconductor wafers to finance the expansion of its S5 fab located near Pyeongtaek, South Korea. The implication is that GPUs, SoCs, controllers, and other types of hardware that Samsung has a hand in will go up in price. These would include NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, whose Ampere GPUs are manufactured by the South Korean electronics giant. Despite contractual agreements made between the two companies, there seems to be some possibility of these graphics cards getting affected by new premiums.
How Samsung Foundry’s price hikes will affect prices of smartphones and graphics cards is something that remains to be seen, but certainly its customers will try to offset higher manufacturing costs somehow.
Source: Samsung (via SeekingAlpha, Tom’s Hardware)