// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
Samsung's fab roadmaps examined — Taylor, Pyeongtaek, and the yield woes behind a $16.5 billion Tesla deal
2nm mass production has started, and Tesla has signed, but Samsung's foundry is still second by a factor of ten and fighting yields.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Divided across two countries and four campuses, Samsung's foundry roadmap runs from the Korean bases at Pyeongtaek, Hwaseong, and Giheung to the new U.S. site at Taylor. Samsung began mass-producing its first-gen 2nm process in 2025, moved equipment into its long-delayed Taylor, Texas fab in April this year, and lined up Tesla's AI6 processor under a $16.5 billion contract signed in July 2025, yet none of it has closed the gap with TSMC.
Samsung confirmed the 2nm milestone in its fourth-quarter 2025 results, the same release in which it returned its foundry unit toward profitability on the back of HBM4 logic-die orders. The unit still trails TSMC roughly 11:1 by revenue, and 2nm yields are reported to be sitting near 55%, below the threshold the business needs to run advanced nodes at a profit.
What separates Samsung from TSMC isn't fabs or customers but yield, and Samsung has been able to absorb the cost of that gap because its foundry unit sits inside the Device Solutions division alongside a memory business posting record profits. The company reports no standalone foundry P&L, which has given the operation years of runway that a pure-play foundry wouldn't have the benefit of.
Samsung's Taylor project is both the centerpiece of its roadmap and the company's longest-running headache. The full campus, covering two fabs, an advanced packaging facility, and an R&D center, has been reported at around $44 billion, with the portion tied to U.S. funding set at over $37 billion. Samsung's CHIPS Act award was revised down from up to $6.4 billion to up to $4.745 billion as the project's scope narrowed, with Texas adding roughly $250 million in state incentives in September last year.
Construction stalled through 2024 and into 2025, with reporting at the time attributing the halt to an absence of committed customers and yield problems on the node the fab was meant to run. Samsung held an equipment move-in ceremony in April, and the site is now set to install a third-gen SF2P+ variant of its 2nm process, with trial production targeted by the end of 2026, full mass production in 2027, and a capacity goal of around 50,000 wafer starts per month. The facility's anchor tenant is Tesla, whose AI6 chip Samsung will build at Taylor under the eight-year deal running through 2033. Tesla's AI6 has reportedly slipped by around six months, tied to a delayed engineering run on Samsung's 2nm line, pushing volume toward late 2027.
Pyeongtaek remains Samsung's largest production base, built out across a series of lines designated P1 through P5. In the near term, activity at Pyeongtaek centers on P4, where Samsung has pulled forward equipment move-in and is reported to be installing an HBM4 base-die line on its 1c-class DRAM, and on P5, the final planned fab at the site, where construction had been halted and is now reviving on the strength of AI memory demand. The P5 buildout carries a reported total investment of nearly 90 trillion won and a 2029 production target, according to Korean trade press.
The Korean expansion runs against a backdrop of capex restraint. Through 2024 and 2025, Samsung was reported to have cut foundry investment sharply and to have reviewed pausing both Pyeongtaek and Taylor work as losses mounted, with foundry utilization sitting around 50% in the second half of 2024 before recovering as clients returned.
Process development runs out of Hwaseong's EUV line. The newer Giheung NRD-K research complex, a roughly 20 trillion won investment running to 2030 and dedicated to advanced-node R&D. Samsung deployed an ASML High-NA EUV research tool, the Twinscan EXE:5000, at Hwaseong for process development, and was understood to be buying two mass-production-class EXE:5200 systems — with the second o