Samsung foundries face yield challenges

Samsung Foundry has had issues with yields at 4nm, 3nm, and 2nm over the past few years. Samsung Foundry's 4nm yield was so bad when it was producing Snapdragon 8 Gen1 for Qualcomm that Qualcomm later abandoned Samsung Foundry in favor of TSMC. TSMC manufactured the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 AP. Eventually, Samsung Foundry increased its 4nm yield to 70%. However, Samsung Foundry still has yield issues at 3nm, which reportedly led to production delays for the 3nm Exynos 2500 AP. As a result, Samsung may have to pay extra money to equip all Galaxy S25 series phones with the more expensive Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC instead of its in-house Exynos 2500. Low yields increase the cost of chips because additional silicon wafers are needed to make enough chips to fulfill orders.