Happy Thursday.
The current thing in tech and business is Iran wiping out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for 3-5 years.
Today’s lineupSequoia Partner Carl Eschenbach at 12:00 PM
Sequoia Partner Pat Grady at 12:00 PM
Phantom Space Co-Founder & CEO Jim Cantrell at 12:25 PM
GV Managing Partner & Head of Europe Tom Hulme at 12:45 PM
Businessman & Investor Mark Cuban at 1:00 PM
Paraform Co-Founder and CEO John Kim at 1:40 PM
Edra AI Co-Founder and CEO Eugen Alpeza at 1:45 PM
RunSybil Co-Founder and CEO Ari Herbert-Voss at 1:50 PM
Upstarts Media Founder and Editor Alex Konrad at 2:00 PM
Samsung Invests $70B in AI Chips
Image: AlamyFinally some good news. Another $70B pouring into solving the compute crunch. Samsung is massive, over a quarter million employees, close to touching a trillion in USD market cap, and pulls in around $200B in USD revenue (maybe $250B this year). They are the global leader in memory (and OLED displays too actually), but they are second in smartphones and second in semiconductor foundry behind TSMC.
Semiconductors still make up around 30 to 40% of their business, and they supply HBM for the Nvidia H100 and Blackwell systems, so they are incredibly important in the AI buildout broadly, but if TSMC is bottlenecked, there’s an opportunity to push the foundry business further.
Tesla has had lots of success with Samsung’s 14nm process, which delivered HW3 for the FSD systems that are actively on the road today in millions of cars. Nearly all Tesla vehicles on U.S. roads have FSD-capable hardware now. The rough estimate from a U.S. regulatory probe was around 3.2 million vehicles. Samsung doesn’t fab Tesla’s most advanced AI training chips though. The Dojo D1 was fabbed on TSMC 7nm and is completely separate from the in-car FSD chips.
So with the backdrop of Nvidia’s massive GTC news-cycle, Samsung dropped the update that they would be increasing their facilities and R&D investments by $72.89 billion. Investors have been optimistic over the past 5 days, and the stock is up 11% during a time when Nasdaq is down 2.2% and geopolitical tensions continue to rise.
As we discussed yesterday, the compute bottleneck is going to be incredibly constraining over the next few years, so every increase in capex in the supply chain is a step in the right direction.
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